Grandad Frank with Aunt Eleanor Beth and dad, Seth John Tiffen. Elmshill farm. c 1914
1914 1950 1969 1971 1972 1988 1976 2010 2025 2020 2017 2025
the key to my eduction has been haptic learning
David Robinson and I marry on Ruakaka Beach in 1969. Whangārei Heads in the background.
Rome holiday 2001
eyes wide open
BUYING A first ART CATaLOGUE. 1971. ANDY WARHOL. Tate britain.
Son Tom discovers plants. 9 Otley Street. Christchurch. 1988
Groovy Glasses New Regent Street. Christchurch. 2017
Tom. Mt Lyford. 1997. Fairlie. Boys on trend. Richard, Mitchel Collingwood Tom Robinson and Michael York. 1997
Henry Moore. Sydney. NSW Art Gallery. Helmut Head No 2. Henry Moore. 1950 Cast 1955. Recent trip. 2024.
Barbara Hepworth Te Papa. 2025 ( note reference MELODY ONE)
House guests at home. Ben with a friend. ( via Room
LaLa ) Henry Bersani (via Room LaLa) Christchurch.
Visitors around at home as guests with Henry Bersani and Malina, house flat mates 2019 Two friends. Right Malina.
To begin the overall:
Many thanks, in particular, to my cousins, Laurie and Ken, Skye, Julia and Caroline, Mark, and nephew Heath, for conversations and meals in 2022, 2023 and 2024, whilst writing this; to my brother Anthony and sister Angela by osmosis and son Tom via the double helix.
Thanks, also, to the staff of MTG and Tairawhiti Museum. Thanks to David. Thanks to all Canada,
authors and filmmakers. Thanks to all family, friends and communities.
Stephanie's Tale I’m seventy seven years old now.
The long heritage of ideas was where I wanted to be reflecting upon when I got older. I decided to make this more true at the end of decade two of the 2000’s.
I made a trip back to Europe and England, USA and Canada in 2001. Getting out and about again secured for me many views.
A person who grows up in a geography far away from the epicenters of decision of power, must contend with information from ideas that are often politically conveyed. Yet, the congestion of a broad view of ideas requires a great number of hours of reading. I was in touch with literature all of my life and my being a child of colonial start, I always had been provided with apexes of vision and had had a childhood of local bubbly charm.
* New York
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2025 I enjoyed, with delicacy, the most recent film about Louis XIV’s, grandson in the film, Le Déluge ( The Flood ) (2025.) (15) I think the title is marvelous. This was the French Revolution.
The physical element of rain falling, gives pause as we see the character, King Louis XVI look up, feel the atmosphere and walk two hours to his death in 1793. No mind at all that the cliché about the collapse of monarchy came via Madam de Pompadour.* Rain washes away the cliché and replaces it with the note of respect for death.
Marie Antoinette displays how she knew politics.
1920s - 1950s A way of viewing any artist contributing to life’s paradoxes has been to see them in awake days and asleep days. I think the Surrealists did us all a great service.
LONDON
The early performance methods
( early 1970's ) where artists created winding curtained or diaphanous pathways deeper into rooms of space, were all enormously inviting.
Activity was starting in this area in my encounters with Art in London.
1970s
History now recalls the commitment in the 1970s to elements of research - scale, text, surface, hue; bodily fluids in Art, for example, and the Land Art movements. A great amount of research was going on in that decade that most started to insist to me to become more alert. It was a general moment when the 2D surface nor the 3D sculpted or cast impression was enough. I was amazed by Turner’s skies in 1971. ( 16) I was amazed by Rothko's deep washes of burgundy to burgundy black that year, also, at the Tate Britain. ( That is what was called the Seagram's Collection.) (17)
Women were intent in several media.
NEW YORK
I was delighted to see a set of Frankenthaler in New York one year later (18) .
As to giving talks at the Gallery, to take on the discipline of looking and feeling for the refinements of my task was to speculate through the layers of seriousness as well as have appreciation for the investment of time that artists give us in the society’s exhibitions spaces. I asked myself the core question, ‘what does ( this ) Art make me think about?’ Art Bites engaged me for a number of occasions. Then I increased my personal writing.
I decided to apply myself to thinking through kin, culture and the contemporary. How might I have evolved?
I know that precursor ripples started for me because of some of my family members who wrote. Then because some of my school teachers or sport, art , english, latin, music, chemistry and geography, placed value on the Arts as having cultural purpose.
We move from the world of power to the world of text.
We move to text/image > to image alone. Q What is the style of this? c. 1999 on. Once the metaphors
became the metropolises. Surely they next became a
story of images in ecology without humans.
(Mau) (19) Yet, I took to heart the writings of Camus. Camus's father had once seen the use of the guillotine.
Camus pondered this.
Mother conducts my fourth birthday activities. She was an ace at party games. Mum studied and ran a kindergarten of her own before she married. She studied. Froebell (!) graduating in 1925. Photograph by Seth John Tiffen.
! See Routledge on Froebel. " Haptic learning' https://www.froebel.org.uk/uploads/documents/Watching-two-year-olds-jump-video-method-becomes-haptic.pdf* The global tours of sculptors Rodin and Moore to Colonial countries were significant awakenings in student lives.e.g https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/touring-exhibitions/past-touring-exhibitions/remembering-rodin' https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/alice-correia-biography-r1171900** The Twin Towers*** Room LaLa is a French short term accommodation business. I had guests from France, India, China, America, Lithuania, Estonia, Peru, New Zealand and Nepal between 2016 - 2018
Home, after the fig tree fell and the topic of climate change ordered the further greening of the home property. c 2018
Home yard with fig tree. 1993. Photogrph by Jurgen Waibel.
It was time to unpave our driveway
in 2018
Six years after the Christchurch Earthquake, our street was
tarsealed to standard by the Council.