Grandad Frank Tiffen with his first two children Aunt Eleanor Beth and dad, Seth John Tiffen. Tussock. Elmshill farm. c 1914
Return to Chapter one here if you are reading chapter one currently
1914 1950 1969 1971 1972 1988 1976 2010 2025 2020 2017 2025
Many thanks, in particular, to my cousins, Laurie and Ken Tiffen, Julia Genet and Caroline Genet, Cousin Mark Fenwick and nephew Heath Tiffen, for conversations and meals in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026, whilst writing this; to my brother Anthony Tiffen and sister Angela Campbell by osmosis and son Tom Robinson via the double helix.Thanks, also, to the staff of MTG Napier and Tairawhiti Museum. Thanks to David. Thanks to all of our Canada family; thanks to several authors. Thanks to my friend Marja Pole (nee Boon)
the key to my education 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
ABOVE. BUYING A first, my First ART CATaLOGUE. 1971. ANDY WARHOL. Tate britain. 17 February - 28 March
Son Tom discovers plants. 9 Otley Street. Christchurch. 1988
Groovy Glasses New Regent Street. Christchurch. 2017
Tom. Mt Lyford. 1997. Boys 'on trend'. Richard Boyd, Mitchel Collingwood, Tom Robinson and Michael York. 1997
Henry Moore. Sydney. NSW Art Gallery. Helmut Head No 2. Henry Moore. 1950 Cast Bronze 1955. ** Photographed on a recent trip to Sydney. 2024.
Barbara Hepworth. Te Papa. 2025 (note reference link in Chapter One). *
correctives co.nz/
Renting flat mates at home. The second decade of the
2000s (booked in via Room LaLa) ***
Ben from Germany with a friend.
Henry Bersani, a New Zealander back from travel in the USA with his friends.
Visitor guests of Henry Bersani and Malina, house flat mates 2019. Two friends. Right Malina.
To begin the overall
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 truer at the end of decade two of the 2000’s.
I had not visited England or Europe after 1976. Then
I made a trip to Europe and England, USA and Canada in 2001.
Getting out and about again offshore secured for me some updated 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.
The congestion of 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.
Being of colonial descent from English families from the north and East Coast of Britain is my New Zealand tale.
I claim that taking photographs has been my aesthetic start. Feeling, listening, moving and seeing were given me by my mother, a kindergarten teacher.
The ARTS
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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.) (3) 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 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 is to look into life’s paradoxes - to see them in awake days and asleep days. I think the Surrealists did themselves a great service for their particular comfort.
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 early encounters with gallery Art in London.
1970s
History now recalls the commitment in the 1970s to elements of research - scale, text, surface, hue, or 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.
I was amazed by Turner’s skies in 1971. (4) 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 Murals) (5)
Women were intent in several media.
NEW YORK 1972
I was delighted to see a set of Frankenthaler in New York one year later (6).
Along with writing about self and family, I decided in my late seventies to give some
Art Bite talks at Christchurch Art Gallery. I asked myself the core question, ‘what does Art make me think about?’ Art Bites engaged me for a number of occasions. Then I increased my personal writing.
The self
I decided to apply myself to thinking through kin, culture and the contemporary to the subject of self. How might I have evolved?
I know that precursor ripples started for me because of some of my family members made photographs. A few wrote. Then, the 21st Century.
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?
no. No.
interrelationships - ecology, urbanity and humans
(Bruce Mau) (7) I took to heart the mid 20th century writings of Camus. Camus's father had once seen the use of the guillotine.
Camus pondered this.
Stephanie Tiffen third Birthday. 1951. Party designed by Mum. Elmshill. On the right, Mum. Phyllis Tiffen.
Children: Siblings Left: Angela and Anthony. Rear view. cousin Julia Feickert. Right, John and Michael Duncan. One tall girl unnamed.
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. Froebel* 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 modern Henry Moore to Colonial countries were significant awakenings in student lives. Barbara Hepworth has been given example here.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
*** 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
*** 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
