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This talk is in two parts.
In the Quarry.1935 
One point of view: A downward view.
In 1961 Ngaio Marsh was gaining accolades from the New York Times  for literature.  She had ten published books. She received an honorary Phd for Literature from Canterbury University in 1962. (1)
Have a think about this.
A 4k High Definition  video camera records 4,000 pixels of horizontal resolution. It has been used for television since 2012. That still gives the viewer a sharpness from the high longview. The camera view, pitched at dominantly this ‘high shot.’, the downward view, as much as any other perspectives mediates, along with the commercials and signage, and including the paying crowd, how and why a  sports game is viewed this way on television. Television broadcasting is an economic complex. Before 4 K cameras, TV showed a game mostly from the sideline with the odd cut away, the odd high view, the scoreboard, and little of the appreciating audience as revenue builders were not so powerfully able to be of significance in the relationship stakes.
We may understand  more than a hundred years prior to this the discipline of drawing and composing with ‘line, colour and mass’ on the two dimensional surface.  This was always on the artist Ngaio Marsh's mind, when we see  the work of a hand in 1935 creating a high view here within a painter’s frame.   Marsh was known for her sense of humour. For example, she often would joke,’ some of her family came from a lunatic asylum and some from a jail.’
Marsh’s circumstances were that she happened to be up a hill. Her father built a house on land that he bought a little  north of  what became the quarry that served much of Valley Road properties with rock material for designers of  buildings and tiered gardens in Christchurch.  We know, many of us , that this painting was first briefly  titled Still Life.  Marsh got a call in 1935 from the CSA Secretary. ‘It is not still life.’ she said.  ‘Oh very well,’ Marsh muttered under her breath.  It became  In the Quarry. In 1947 it was  this  or Relief Workers.   In 1990, of interest to reveal,  a letter to the Press editor made a comment about this painting  from the point of view of  sociology, not aesthetic. It's about themes of context that I decided to make a push towards.    The artists' competencies are executed here in this oil. The artist  walked down  and then to a rise to purvey this quarry  for her outline sketch. There, as it happens, were many men, pulled in there to be accounted for from unemployment. Still Life, by Marsh -   was a Marsh pun. However, in good spirit, a little more from the objects in view, i.e, the workers on Government relief schemes, the son of one of the quarry workers, Kevin Clark wrote  a  letter to complain about the painting. He wrote about his dad, Ted Clark and his colleague quarry workers being somewhat offended, adding in brackets, ( or pretending to be so ) at being depicted with ‘ I Quote, “ hands on hips, or sitting on the ground, and lying in wheelbarrows.”  arrived. Of cultural value, nevertheless, and invaluable,  we hear  that  Clarke wrote in 1990,  about ‘a little tit for tat’, whereby, Ted Clarke asked his brother to make another picture. It is a picture of   a track  going uphill. It is ‘ littered with little red Craven A cigarette packets.’ Relief workers, Clarke wrote,  could not afford tailor made cigarettes, or even much tobacco. The picture was duly delivered and well received. Later, a carton of Craven A arrived at the quarry and was shared amongst the men with a note - an appreciation from Ngaio Marsh - (2) That clipping is stored in the Ngaio Marsh heritage house.
I read here a couple of paragraphs from the  history of economics in New Zealand then, for it may explain a lack of wheelbarrows:‘For New Zealand, as for most of the world outside Russia, the great depression of the early 1930s was the most shattering economic experience ever recorded. Exports fell by 45 per cent in two years, national income by 40 per cent in three. The balance of payments was further weakened by the burden of interest on the overseas debt. At the worst point of the depression, the number of unemployed may have exceeded 70,000. 
The Depression has rightly been described as a traumatic experience; for the second time at least since the founding of the colony, new New Zealanders found themselves disillusioned by the appearance in their adopted country of conditions they thought they had escaped from.The depression was, in fact, aggravated by New Zealand's extreme unpreparedness to meet it. Despite New Zealand's early reputation as a “social laboratory”, her social services had in fact fallen behind those of many other countries in the post-1918 years, and the country entered the depression without even the modest provision for unemployment relief by which the British industrial worker was protected. The policy of the Coalition Government formed in September 1931 was on the whole unenterprising and, perhaps inevitably, unenlightened in the Keynesian*  ( * demand creates supply) sense of the word. ‘3This painting, Marsh retained in her collection. The content refers to a council  decision to extend the roading up Valley Rd, using gravel  and rocks from the quarry there.
Marsh wrote in 1966 that she spent all her younger days thinking, line, mass, colour.  She spent  her time in the life  room at Art school. From preschool  age,  she stated that she would be an artist when she grew up. By 1913  -1919 she was already part-time in the  Canterbury  institutions of  Art education. Richard Wallworth and his wife Elizabeth, were sources of encouragement. There is a great photograph of the three on a West coast  drawing jaunt in the Brigit Williams 1991 biography.  R. Wallworth came from Lancashire. He  was President of the CSA in 1927  He, I quote from a Christchurch Art Gallery catalogue,‘ painted a number of pastoral scenes involving sheep mustering, including a poster design for the Empire Marketing Board in 1927. 4

 Consider two artists, Marsh and Spencer-Bower. Ngaio Marsh. born,1895.Spencer-Bower. 1905. We know that these two were companions in starting a studio  with other women as  a group of women artist  friends.   These young women, truth be told, needed to get away from Victorian parents. (p 31) One painting for that exhibition in 1936 from Marsh was  in the Group Show.Nor West Goes Over.  5 This was  not an English sky  to dominate the  landscape. The sky was  an Antipodean one with its local Foehn wind. But, Marsh has said, “ I never felt I was doing what New Zealand was about   in my paintings”(p35)It is when I read Marsh’s autobiography that I drew upon some insights that I have about  her  transition away from two dimensional art except that it served  her theatre  sketchbook and her well being  so often. She replaced Art activity with  3D presentations of live drama- the push of the written word,  specifically   Detective  story writing, as we know, and Shakespeare.   She borrowed into craft in theatre as being broad . Her character, by inclination, was Anglophile.  She was used to  performance since childhood-  in church,  schooling and family.    There was incense at St Michael’s - verses and customs  at St Margarets and a grandad  who knew many magic sleight of hands and was thoroughly humorous in  Victorian style.
I place my perception in this direction as a New Zealander born into English stock whose  English generations  migrated here in the mid nineteenth century. I grew up on a sheep station in Hawkes Bay  where the dramas that my great grandmother would have gone to, had she, ( she having  born seven children  here  by 1871)  were Victorian one-act  farces held by local repertory in Waipukurau in their Town Hall. Enthusiastic people would go to these.  By day the menfolk toiled respectably in worn felt fedoras.  From a Hawkes Bay newspaper,  I quote:In 1893, “Done on Both Sides” by popular Victorian playwright John Maddison Morton, “Box and Cox”;  and “Married and Settled” by J Stirling Coyne.”  6   All three were farces.  There is some great academic writing about the prolific popularity of farces in London. Thousands were produced. They almost overran serious drama as the same audiences, i.e those for melodrama, kept buying most of the tickets, so the stage manager kept turning tricks over as new, for them,  often, the repeating seat buyers. Initial English farces were rip offs of French ones, it might be said.  By the time that they  reached New York, the Americans ripped off  single popular lines and then made modifications thereon so as to avoid royalties.  Box and Cox , for example, rose to enormous fame. It’s plot  was a landlady renting one room of lodging to two men, by day and night,  used by each  without either having any  knowledge.  7  I mention this so as to preface where minds of  low wit , one might say, were in the culture and to move us along in accounting for the delight  to be taken in  seeing this painting in this exhibition as the sign of her expertise and then as a sign of the painting as  a passing that Marsh took into her next, her larger passionate  groove, the stage  and then  economically  further,  books were  to  become the thing. The stage,  formatively, required the third dimension.
  What I like about seeing this painting included here in this whole exhibition  is, not only that the curator has passed  on thanks to several  practitioners. The large question is  the dilemma of the challenge to painters from the ground.   What of the mental  shakeup  in all this spatial interruption ? What  and how did small gatherings of audiences to these artists originally respond?.   The two edges of the sword always are, in any artistic generation, the question of’ how ‘ to put food on the table’ and to find personal grounding in expression.   The history of  economic reality is  formidable  through all of the Twentieth Century. This opens as an undertow in most of the century's Art History.  In the  Twentieth Century there were increased tumults in economic swings and national wars. The audience of today, with  curatorial concentration, now knows of the extent of works by artists that visualised a changing urbanised, industrialized time.
I take us to a Ngaio Marsh pensive time. First: Pre- World War I
Marsh, in 1965, wrote  appraising her friend, Spenser- Bower,  remarking about her  mother in two lights:
‘One of her ( Olivia’s)  earliest recollections of her  mother is  'Mother would go to meetings of Pankhurst in the long night. Father had been tutoring. Mother had come home in great excitement- we were dancing on the lawn. Father's pupil had knocked a man down who had attacked mother. 'Are you going to fight to get your way?' the man has said. 'We women don't kill. we bring life Into the world, we give birth, we don't kill'. Mother repeated it often - she thought Mrs. Pankhurst was so marvellous.’8
In a second insight about Spenser- Bower, she wrote:‘Olivia felt her mother’s paintings as a student were superior to those she later did when, OlivIa felt, she resorted to  prettiness. Rosa became very involved in making a living from her work and quite probably sacrificed her Inventive talents for something more commercial. (6) A newspaper clipping of Rosa Spencer Bower's October, 1920  speaks of her English paintings with an appreciation for her versatility in handling different subject matter: old castles. quaint roadways, peeps of bIossoms in  gardens, orchards, Streams, and woods. and wildflowers.’ 9
I continue to  quote Marsh from her autobiography:
‘Marsh once described the plight of the early Pakeha painters of stature who found themselves “caught up in a completely strange landscape” in Aotearoa/NewZealand:‘Some of them, the best of them, knew, perhaps instinctively, that this country could not be represented, as we say nowadays ‘photographically’, with any success. They had no formulae designed to cope with the violent colour, the uncompromising clarity, the absence of composed foregrounds, in a word, the utter strangeness of this antipodean landscape where blue screamed blueness; where vegetation lay in great clots of dark wicked green over the flanks of knife-edged mountains. Steam burst out of the landscape with the force of an oath. Terraces were lolly pink and white. Straw-coloured plains stretched without incident under skies that at noonday seemed to be made of incandescent tin. Rivers boiled impersonally through indelicate wastes. It was not at all Victorian. But they painted in obedience.’10

30 years after Ngaio Marsh exhibited a painting  in Christchurch for possibly the last time, I came to live in Christchurch.  I came in 1974.   I attended three of  The Group art shows at  the CSA gallery.  I   had met  or seen  works of Vivian and  Gavin Bishop, Tony Fomison,  Barry Cleavin, Phillip Clairmont and Trevor Moffat.  When I lived in the North Island, I had seen Ralph Hotere,  Michael Illingworth, Pat Hanley, Don Driver, Richard Ellis and the early New Zealand surrealist Brent Wong,   works  from six years before. ( Wong’s 1969 painting of Aro Street, Wellington, is in this collection )   I had sighted Olivia Spencer Bower. In the  Group exhibitions.
We all know how many  artists were grateful for what and how their Art teachers taught at institutions. It was then up to an artist to find a style. Along  with Evelyn Page and Spencer -Bower, Mash was, for a time,  a seriously interested painter.  Her interest did not last. I look at this painting, as I look at all of the paintings in the exhibition. Artists were enjoying themselves.   Painters paint as they like to.
I  suggest  that this painting  is the imminent exit image assembled by Ken Hall, From the Ground.   Marsh had found her feet as a writer by this year. This  is the  last hanging placed  in this exhibition.  If we read the rooms from left to right, ( or right to left if you are reading Chinese ) this painting becomes  a segue of this artist into  her next life.  Nevertheless,  her various  titles caused some puzzlement and also sit as historical reflection.  I pretend that  as she glanced down into that gully seeing men in cluster  that she would not ever really see again this way. She was also looking  at worker fashionability and impressionability, sic. the topic of character .These men had Fedoras for the hot outdoor sun, aka New Zealand and Australia. She wasn’t going to take an Antipodean story, and a European story in this vein , much further from here. 
 The Fedora, in theatrical terms, was  actually invented by a Frenchman  and taken up with alacrity by Sarah Berhardt. I quote:‘Victorien Sardou, presented in Paris in 1882 in  which the heroine, Sarah Bernhardt, played the role of "Fedora". 11 “Over time, it would become the headgear of tough guys, of Chicago gangsters, of private detectives, of reporters and of almost all men, above all in the 30s.Later on, the suffragists, the women who revindicate equality of civil rights will choose the Fedora as a sign of belonging to the movement”
 To me, this Fedora topic got me started for the Art Bite.  I got a job at the Clarendon Hotel reception at  the start of 1974. In the city men wore homburgs. 12  Still, in that year, older  more formally dressed men were walking around in homburg hats.  One morning, Mr Nordmeyer, a retired politician,  dressed,  walked to the counter, announcing himself.  He had been  active in the New Zealand Labour Party, a supporter of the generation of Nash ( Walter Nash ). These individuals  were putting in law improved conditions for  livelihood for the working man and citizens.  The new hat aligned my thinking to changing provisions for people in society brought on by parliamentary reforms  13 

  Ngaio Marsh stood for a moment above the quarry  in 1935 and she had a deft and effective drawing hand to freeze  a tableau in desolate  action. In the depression, a relief worker, by definition,  floundered, but  every man required to retain dignity.  Otherwise, life may lead to negativity,  self-harm or worse. Emotional depression, shock and confusion would have been running rampant in the 1930s.  How often were unemployed working people interviewed about the pointlessness of  work efficiency at that time?  Doesn't a workforce have some scepticism about the manipulations of inflations, deflations and banking systems? Marsh inadvertently captured a passive and still traumatized collective, with individuals subdued.
                                                                                                A  painting  set in 1919 the end of World War I,   is a very still  crowd in Dunedin. It  is hung opposite here.  It portrays  the Octagon.    People were awaiting the pronouncement.  What several dreads would be on their minds? How many of that crowd had lost a loved one?  The Treaty of Versailles had just been signed.  What were some of its requirements? Then another war emerged. Post World War II, Marsh was in London, a public figure, ten novels published in the Detective  genre. In living abroad Marsh developed a dual identity, her biographer, Margaret Lewis describes. I quote:‘  ‘she cultivated a dual identity, signing hotel registers in New Zealand with a flourish as ‘Ngaio Marsh, London, and in England, as ‘Ngaio Marsh, New Zealand’. 14. 

The second point of view
I went up  to the Ngaio Marsh Heritage House for a first visit in order to prepare for this talk on June 4, 2024. Upon taking my visit to the house, I entered segment two of my perceptions. This house was a set for living.  This time I saw the importance of seeing the full architectural history - the Hurst Seager space, the charm of heritage being sustained by volunteers, the paintwork, the fabrics.  I saw a capture of a significant cultural identity’s persona   reflected in the third dimension and visualised how embodied and fulfilled her life was. 
I have decided to focus upon this second idea :   dressing- dressing for performance is a feature fact. 
 The cottage was built in 1906.  It represents the Hurst Seeger thesis of habitable space intentionally set in garden mien.  The site carries idealism. Ngaio Marsh experienced this superb domestic habitation in which she lived all of her life, except for theatre trips.   From there she also elevated the perception of the employment of serious stage as an artform in Christchurch. She maintained connections and visitors to the space. A person may, on tour of this Heritage , go downstairs to inspect old pastels in a trunk, or  oils in the living room above. One may spot books read, look at bricolage lacquered trays made as these  were accorded to her time selling  home made  trays with a friend in London at their interior furnishings business  during her years  living there.  You may see and be in her living room -  see and note the life that she made use of, what  personal objects of collection were and see her mementos. Here, there is  a photo of her with theatrical folk; photos of theatrical folk. You  feel the heating of the underfloor, see past the tennis courts to the hills , out of sight some days in winter mist.   With knowledge, that view is known to be  the one past the tennis courts  area where  her father played  until he was eighty.  What was indelibly so, from more reading from Marsh’s autobiography, was that as soon as after her father died, ( 1949 ) no one in this country, really, cared much for Shakespeare, except  the odd times in Universities and in the city.  When Hamlet was put on in 1958 it had not been performed in twenty years.  But, amends were made at the Canterbury University Drama Society.  I, not a thespian lover to any great degree, remember Mervyn Glue , so many times, as to be seen as a lawyer in town and equally doing summer Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hagley Park and the Arts Centre. I enjoyed  the knowledge,  by living in the city, that Tony Geddes,  for example,  once a painting graduate, was a whiz at stage set design.  
The list is long of those who studied painting who went on to become fully engaged in something else of interest.  I remember when I produced a documentary film in 1977, for example, Gil Hanley, a known photographer, talked with me about ongoing projects. Here, at the start of this exhibition., in another booth,  in  From the Ground, we see Hanly’s point of view of  roofscapes, washing on the line. 
Is this enough to satisfy?  A view from the ground? What questions, do you think, is this gallery exhibition asking? 

Thank you.
 Footnotes:Marsh

In the 1930s Marsh helped raise the detective story to the level of a respectable literary genre by writing books that combine an elegant literary style with deftly observed characters and credible social settings. The art world and the theatre provided the background for many of her more than 30 novels, including Artists in Crime (1938), Final Curtain (1947), and Opening Night (1951), all of which feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn. These books, together with such works as Overture to Death (1939), A Surfeit of Lampreys (1941), Death of a Fool (1956), Dead Water (1963), Black as He’s Painted (1974), and Light Thickens (1982), are classic examples of the traditional detective story, giving readers a cleverly contrived puzzle involving sharply drawn characters against an authentic background. Marsh also wrote about New Zealand and about the theater.
Dame Ngaio Marsh published 34 crime novels from 1934-1982, has had her work translated in over 100 languages, and won the Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master award in 1978.  For her novels she is known in world circles. In the 1990s BBC Television made a series based on the Inspector Alleyn Mysteries.
Her parent’s house was built bySamuel Hurst Seegarhttps://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3s8/seager-samuel-hurst
DBE Dame Commander of the British Empire. 1966.TelevisionA Man Lay Dead (1993)IMBD Trailerhttps://www.imdb.com/video/vi2821176601/?playlistId=tt0510133&ref_=vp_rv_ap_0