CHAPTER ONE cont
I am a member of the fifth generation of English families that migrated to New Zealand in 1839 and '42.
Public service, industry, science, education, invention in the art of agriculture and science is the very foundation of national wealth and of human progress here. This would have been the ethos of the early settlers. In this new era, post the internet, the nation is teaching itself about human, social and sustainable balance. It is also living with the issues of change. The wheels of commerce and power plays run on.
Public service, industry, science, education, invention in the art of agriculture and science is the very foundation of national wealth and of human progress here. This would have been the ethos of the early settlers. In this new era, post the internet, the nation is teaching itself about human, social and sustainable balance. It is also living with the issues of change. The wheels of commerce and power plays run on.
REPRESENTATIONS
Stephanie, drinking out of the beach water tap.
Photograph by Seth Tiffen. 1950.
The faces of English educated women and men are representations of my genetic groups. British migrant. The first son and daughter’s marriages in the next generation who lived in New Zealand were to Britishers, the next children to first second and third generation New Zealand European.
George, with science and chemistry study in England under his belt before becoming a doctor, worked with scalpel and assisted in early steps with Sulphur aether. I read only recently that research in this field started in Vienna by the end of the century, a doctor, Theodor Billroth, was pioneering the use of Chloroform and ether for Anaesthesia in Vienna, ‘the ‘mecca of medicine ‘, at around the same time that Freud was opening an envelope on the human psyche. 46A factor that I have enjoyed thinking about George and his temperament is that he was from the world of the Apothecary. There is a warm segment in a biography about GOETHE, about such a character type. ' In the life of small town the apothecary was a person of importance. He was a center for local and outside news, adviser and confidant in many and often delicate situations; people used to meet in the apothecary's for a glass of home-made wine and a chat. Like an alchemist he made his experiements , often in new and untried methods, and was receptive to new ideas; in most cases he was in opposition to the physicians, who were very conscious of their standing. 47 '
George, with science and chemistry study in England under his belt before becoming a doctor, worked with scalpel and assisted in early steps with Sulphur aether. I read only recently that research in this field started in Vienna by the end of the century, a doctor, Theodor Billroth, was pioneering the use of Chloroform and ether for Anaesthesia in Vienna, ‘the ‘mecca of medicine ‘, at around the same time that Freud was opening an envelope on the human psyche. 46A factor that I have enjoyed thinking about George and his temperament is that he was from the world of the Apothecary. There is a warm segment in a biography about GOETHE, about such a character type. ' In the life of small town the apothecary was a person of importance. He was a center for local and outside news, adviser and confidant in many and often delicate situations; people used to meet in the apothecary's for a glass of home-made wine and a chat. Like an alchemist he made his experiements , often in new and untried methods, and was receptive to new ideas; in most cases he was in opposition to the physicians, who were very conscious of their standing. 47 '
Excerpt. Oil. by Tennyson Cole. An image fragment of great grandmother, Lucy Tiffen. 1893 (See Appendix Hawkes Bay. Re: more detail about Family.) (Artist. Tennyson Cole. Appendix ii)
From the start I liked that the artist Tennyson Cole had asked great grandmother Lucy to make a front on look for her commissioned portrait. Cole was a visiting artist from Soho, who was in a singing troupe on tour from Hobart to New Zealand. He fitted Lucy in with one or two other Antipodeans. He made several paintings in India, Africa, America and then more back in England.
Three Tiffen women signed the Suffrage petition, one , near my great grandmother's age, just five years younger, who was a daughter of the first born Tiffen of our family from Kent. 48 No 427. was Amelia, daughter of Charlotte Tiffen, raised as Miss Davenport in France with her English parents - her dad, Theodore Davenport , a scholar and teacher in Normandy. She came to New Zealand upon invitation of her Uncle Henry Tiffen when she became a destitute young widow to her husband, a planter, Mr Randall, whose business affairs fell to disarray when he died of a fever in Ghana.
444, 445.
The other two signees were Lucy Tiffen, Amelia's in-law Aunt when Lucy married Charlotte's younger brother, Frederick Tiffen.
Louisa Winifred, daughter of Lucy and Fred Tiffen, signed with her mother on the same day.
(online image) Silver Range ending in Hawkes Bay. I quote: Silver Range. ‘Following the line of a series of four fault lines running north-south, known as the Silver Range Fault Zone.’
One of the most specific facts dads mentioned to me when we drove from home to town from the farm (we went monthly). On each good light day after some rain dad would point and say, “Look, Silver Range”. He made great emphasis about this. The face of a sharp peak of land glistened back to us up off to the east side of the road facing west. It was alive with light. Our farm sat just where the last ridge petered out.
The land is very new here in New Zealand, geologically.
It appears that the land cover was grass and fern at the time of the sale of the Waipukurau Block (1851) which included the Silver Range within its northern boundary. The original forest was likely to have been destroyed by winds, floods and then fires over the preceding hundreds of years, although pockets of bush are known to exist on the bank of the Tukituki River and a large wetland to the northwest of Silver Range.’
It appears that the land cover was grass and fern at the time of the sale of the Waipukurau Block (1851) which included the Silver Range within its northern boundary. The original forest was likely to have been destroyed by winds, floods and then fires over the preceding hundreds of years, although pockets of bush are known to exist on the bank of the Tukituki River and a large wetland to the northwest of Silver Range.’
The Waipukurau Block was considered as the largest land sale that the New Zealand Government organized to sell to Hawkes Bay European settlers, where Māori had conceded sales in 1855.
In 1959, my Nana Irene and family, arranged a party to celebrate 100 years of Elmshill.
In 1959, my Nana Irene and family, arranged a party to celebrate 100 years of Elmshill.
*Māori Myth
Official Elmshill Farm Centennial Photograph 1959The Centennial farm Event, Elmshill, the Estate of Frank Tiffen, Frederick's son.
Back Row. Cole Tiffen, Betty Tiffen, Seth Tiffen, Neal Tiffen
Middle Row. Jack Tiffen, Winifred Lysnar, Priscilla Feickert, Anthony Tiffen. Middle. Irene Tiffen
Kneeling back. Jack’s daughter (unknown), Susan Tiffen, Angela Tiffen, David Tiffen.
Front Row, Julia Feickert. Kaye Tiffen. Cynthia Tiffen. Laurie Tiffen. Stephanie Tiffen.
Great Grandad Frederick and Lucy Eleanor Tiffen had married in 1859. This was their first daughter Mary Eleanor, born in 1862.
Mary Eleanor Tuke ( née Tiffen) (1862- 1973) Napier. Private collection c 1929
Mary became wife to an Anglican Minister, Charles Tuke, in 1883
TUKE-TIFFEN.-On the 18th January, at St John's Church, Napier, by the Rev De Berdt HOVELL assisted by the Rev H Woodford St HILL, the Rev Charles Laurence TUKE, fifth son of the Rev F E TUKE, Rector of Borden, Kent, ( See below) to Mary Eleanor, eldest daughter of F TIFFEN, Esq. of Elms Hill, Hawke's Bay.
Young Mary Eleanor Tiffen
The children in this family, lived in a thriving farming community accustomed to some intermingling with the Kahungunu Iwi in the region. Mary was four when a Hau Hau opposition force attacked a settler community nine kilometers from Taradale. This was a one-day war skirmish of 1866 (more than thirty Maori and pakeha killed). New Zealand War stories were passed to the family in shorthand i.e that Mary was a little girl when HauHau were nearby and that one day the Tiffen women hid for three days in the bush because they heard an explosion and thought they were being attacked. It transpired, however, that explosions they heard were their homemade bottles of ginger beer in an outhouse.
Ida Lysnar (née Tiffen) 1866 - 1939
Ida married Douglas Lysnar in 1893 in Taradale and went to live in Gisborne. Their daughter, Winifred, (1901 - 1975) is standing on the left of the prior family image. I met this one woman from this generation of women in 1959.
The couple's daughter Winifred with her parents Ida and Douglas Lysnar. Gisborne. 1910
A great source of interest to me. She stands with her five cousins in the Centennial photograph. More about Winifred later.
Early morning swimmer Mission Bay Auckland. The day after one of my cousins funeral and burial at Purewa cemetery, Auckland, in 2018
Dawn. Lake Sorrento. B.C. Canada. 2016
Photograph by Stephanie Beth
Dawn. Pegasus Bay. Canterbury. New Zealand
Dawn, Tuki Tuki River. Central Hawkes Bay. 2023.
Photograph by Stephanie Beth.
Son, Tom Robinson. Born 1988. Home.1998.
Tom. visiting at home. 2024.
- Monster doll with no teeth showing. By Stacey Robson. 2026
In the year that I travelled home to live in New Zealand from Europe with David, in 1974, father's cousin Winifred died in hospital. She was well known in her town, Gisborne. As Amelia Randall had been talked about in the family to me, along with Winifred, family details about stamina of these past two girls from the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, gave me one or two keys to turn to assert questions about my life and my own actions. Fifty years further on, I became fond of thinking of the turn of the 20th Century ( sic affected by preceding histories ) as well as the mid 20th Century as having been shapers to me. An idea of an evolution of thought became a firm recognition, whilst that very thought also bore a respect for traditions as also being values taught in history.
I settled into some research and writing. The research required my making visits to museums, home sites and other cousins in the North Island.
I was not a formal Art History girl with any focused sense of scrutiny when I was young in that I did not wish to interrogate small images in books persistently, for I was an outdoors girl. That scale of looking felt an irritation of limitation so horribly. I had loved being taken to galleries as a child though. Every winter holiday our family would go to city galleries all over the country. The sense of being denied real experience with art was enough to set me off to travel, with the determination to get to large galleries. Artists, I deduced, really were something of a mystery and a clan. I had my first gallery experiences in Wellington, Dunedin and Auckland. Then, Melbourne, Sydney, Brussels, TATE Britain, the Frick and MOMA, in New York. I saw Guernica, in MOMA, 1972. A bigger leap.
I had a huge impact to nerves for art by being in Bangkok for four nights in 1970, when I first started travelling by masses of peoples. Passing through there, feeling the atmosphere of a town where active soldiers of the Vietnam War were units taking their week of R&R, a cacophonous world of intense night life, uniforms, abandoned drinking, procuring, noise and wantonness gave me my first shock of imagining what, in dynamics of line, geometry, space and colour, the inspired famous Northern War tableaus were all about. I hadn't yet been to big cities, though. Instead I was being primed for Kubrick cinema.
2025
I lent against the lounge fireplace today, a framed print of a coloured etching that I bought early in 1976, for a moment of thought. It was for a wall in our first flat in the city.
Pavillon d’ Agreement Sur un Etang (1867) (Christies carries one of this Pavillion)The architectural concept is a popular visual trope through French history *
English Copper Pot. Dole Pineapple. Photograph by Stephanie. 2023.
*Château de Fontainebleau: There is a well-known historical building called the Pavillon de l'Étang aux Carpes (Pavilion of the Carp Pond) at the Château de Fontainebleau in France. History: The pond (this one shown here) was created in the Middle Ages and used for extravagant nautical festivals. The half- timbered pavilion was built by Louis Le Vau under Louis XIV in 1662
Never too Young to Learn. 2015. Artist Nichola Jackson. Dunedin Art Gallery. 2019 Photograph by Stephanie Beth
Me and friends at meal in Christchurch. Pat Monro, right, from Whangarei. Our Whangarei friends came to David's and my 25th. 1994 Photograph by David Robinson
Tongariro National Park. Holiday with Tom. 1995 Photograph by Tom Robinson.
Forecourt. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Contemporary Section.Sydney 2025.
Tom and Kate the Cat. 1994
Researching 2023
NZ Rail. East Coast. South Island. 2017
Railway track. Canada.Waterville to Montreal to New York! Photograph by Stephanie 2019
The provisional title for this ebook was Waves, Blood and the Jetstream (2023)
Ruapuna Motorcycle Races. Canterbury. From the left. Robbie McCallum, David Robinson, Maureen Garvie, Robert Garvie. 1976 Photograph by Stephanie Beth 1976
Six(eleven) years ago this week, @LIGO detects first gravitational waves, allowing us to "hear" the sound of two black holes colliding. Astounding achievement. Brian Green Tweet. 2015 49
we are all waves and particleshe ngaru katoa matou me nga matūrikiAll is waves and then there is lighthe ngaru katoaa ka marama ano
Imagine Sudbury, Ontario. David and I both went past there on the train in 1972. There we saw our first lunar landscape from the train route from Banff to Toronto to Montreal. At Sudbury already one ecosystem had been eviscerated by the toxins. Today go 2 kilometers underground to the physics Research station SNOWLAB or go to Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Take it all to equations, on the matter of scale. We’re in the “middle”, Turok said in 2016. * 50 Halfway. 10 to minus five. That’s the middle of space/time complexity. We Humans. Us and earth in the middle of the” limits” to our galaxy. Equations describe the waves: magnetic fields, radio, silence, darkness. All are waves. Simply. Then there is light. It is a particle and a wave. Take these now as metaphors.
Part one what banged* he aha i pupuhi
Our migrationTo tatou hekePart two
Our educationto maatau matauranga Part two
symmetry and synchronicityhangarite me te hangarite
Our Education Plus, in 2015 the black hole waves - what banged is seen. 2021 hangarite & tukutahitanga we live in a finite universe. (quantum mechanics says so)
Part threeluminosity and reckoningwhakamarama me te tatau
Our migrationTo tatou hekePart two
Our educationto maatau matauranga Part two
symmetry and synchronicityhangarite me te hangarite
Our Education Plus, in 2015 the black hole waves - what banged is seen. 2021 hangarite & tukutahitanga we live in a finite universe. (quantum mechanics says so)
Part threeluminosity and reckoningwhakamarama me te tatau
That’s the metaphor. Quantum physics is just an algorithm. We are all waves and particles. mehua hangarau, quantum mechanics, e ai ta, says so.
Waves are crucial to the understanding of atoms and electromagnetism. Yet there was the paradox. Light always has the same speed. Who would have thought of space and time entities as separate? 51 Then, time and space, Einstein pointed out, depends on the observer. e.g. relativity, i.e. Space and Time are malleable. Then Feynman could point out the expanding universe. But you must understand number 137. So, there is spin2 (gravity), spin 1 (photons) no spin, (Higgs Boson) half spin (electrons and neutrinos), now for example, the Event Horizon telescope.52 Or the Laser interferometer gravitational -wave observatory that saw two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago 53We were waiting with bated breath for collisions of protons. Since Higgs established the field, we are stable to the point of 10 to the power of 500 years to maybe the next tunneling, perhaps another Big Bang.
* Professor Neil Turok asked maths the question here. He is now located in Edinburgh in the Higgs Chair of Physics. 54
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I am on Pakeha, a shepherd's horse. Elmshill. 1959
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Leon Narby. DOP. Stephanie Beth. Director. IN JOY. 1980 55
Tiffany Thornley remembers. Activism. 50 years on. (1975) 56 A presentation arranged by the curator of the Christchurch Art Gallery library. A Q & A about ‘the times’ for Feminism, at the Spiral Collective half century anniversary celebration in books, Magazine covers and articles publishing.Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2025
THE VISUAL WORLD From where do the prompts come to the artist to create?
Thinking about Art. Talking about Art
In 2018 I decided to write some talks to present at my local Art gallery to keep myself occupied by sensitivities. I had finished producing three independent documentary films. The rumbling of all indications of world change were blatantly on the horizon. Climate disruption had brought in stories of waste, loss, despair. 2018 was only ten years after the 2008 financial crash. Dahr Jamail was just one Arctic ice researcher I read who found different way to live and be in this world. 2019. As well as being an ice researchers, he participated as a soldier in the American War of Invasion in Iraq, a war sometimes described as the Second Gulf War 57
Thinking about Art. Talking about Art
In 2018 I decided to write some talks to present at my local Art gallery to keep myself occupied by sensitivities. I had finished producing three independent documentary films. The rumbling of all indications of world change were blatantly on the horizon. Climate disruption had brought in stories of waste, loss, despair. 2018 was only ten years after the 2008 financial crash. Dahr Jamail was just one Arctic ice researcher I read who found different way to live and be in this world. 2019. As well as being an ice researchers, he participated as a soldier in the American War of Invasion in Iraq, a war sometimes described as the Second Gulf War 57
To talk about the topic of imagination, people practising close attention to life, felt like an earnest place to be. The talks I took on are called Art Bites. Twenty-five minutes solo. I put this decision down to the excitement I felt that I had time to do this; that life had brought me to this form of meditation.
I recalled a parallel of me at eighteen years of age, stepping out to see and feel forms of raw chaos, vigorousness and experimentation by a few artist on the ‘white wall’. I put Francis Bacon in that success camp.
Coast outthrust. Kaikoura after an earthquake of 2016 in 2020. Photographs by Stephanie Beth.57
Thinking of Francis Bacon again. I saw his paintings of the early to mid ‘60’s in London in 1971. I respected the bull walking off stage at the end of his career. Bulls carry mana.58 It hadn’t gone past me, either, that Bacon had been enamored by Picasso. He talked about this in an interview in 1985. 59
I decided to give some talks as a way to foreground what some retrospective thinking about how human life draws gratefully from the Arts at poetic, video and audial levels.
I note some of my wanderings.
GOMA. Gallery of Modern Art. Brisbane. 2023
The Acropolis. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2023
Exhibition. ‘Michael Zavros: The Favourite‘ in 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery) and 1.2 at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)
On holiday in Brisbane in 2023, Australian artist, Michael Zavros wrote a blog. Hyperrealism and a kitsch moment. Acropolis Now. 60 Wall mural and setup for selfies and backgammon play. Zavros described his Acropolis piece as a “kitsch, selfie moment” and “very much about spectacle”. Most unusually, it’s a work that won’t have a life beyond the exhibition, but its transience is part of the appeal for him.* (Sydney Morning Herald) 2023.
*Zavro selected for the Sydney Morning Herald article 2023
Self at back a gammon table Zavros had assembled there. GOAMA. 2023
GOMA. Gallery of Modern Art. Brisbane. 'The Favorite' Exhibition.
Bad Dad 2017 was in this exhibition in 2023. Zavros is shown painting finishing strokes. The image was selected for the Sydney Morning Herald article 2023 61
* There were some astonishing works here. Artist, Zavros, had cajoled his own children into participation in his matrix of critique about the downfalls of Narcissism, and more.
Regent Street. London. Photography one Sunday by Stephanie Beth. 1971
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Looking at New York from the 18th Floor of the Drake Hotel. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1972
David. We had a suite for four nights , courtesay of staff connections. 1972
Tom and Tom's cat. Kate. Several toys historical. Three made by my mother in the 1950s. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1992
Tom's fifth Birthday. 1993
Arts Center roof. Below. Lumiere Cinema at the Arts Center. Christchurch. October 2025.
This area was our apartment space 1982 - 3.
We, David and I, were with a set of six other locals as first tenants in the Art Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand in the early 1980s. We lived there for two years. After the earthquake of 2011 our space was renovated to become the ‘artist in residence’ apartment. The building is still one of our city haunts.
Collage. Dog skeletons. A small grassy gully. Assembled by Stephanie. 2024
I could see my beginnings. I could see what I had decided to do by marrying and travelling. Every extra note of attention I paid to people’s awareness, this recognition of patterning and narrative becomes the overall consideration for Life, Sometime After the Horse was Harnessed. I have enjoyed the use of the camera eye as I have lived.
At eleven years on a walk just over the valley next to the shepherd's house on Elmshill farm catch and saddle Lucky, my rental pony, I was stopped by seeing a cluster of carcasses in the gully down from the house. Such an image required interpretation. I deduced that the young shepherd in the late 1950’s killed several of his sheepdogs in a violent temper. I took in the fact that my dad did not extend his employment past the first contract.
I started writing these memoir notes deliberately in June 2023. I took first notes as soon as I saw the White sister's gravesite at Bolton Street, and the Monteith site, back in 2001 in Bolton Street,Wellington. I was only a few years away from making a film in America , after my travel in 2001, though. But what became pivotal, was that I believed that I would make time to look into family and the 19th century as fuel with which to consider times at large, limitations at large, the idea of large monetary global cycles and the arrival again of war.
I started writing these memoir notes deliberately in June 2023. I took first notes as soon as I saw the White sister's gravesite at Bolton Street, and the Monteith site, back in 2001 in Bolton Street,Wellington. I was only a few years away from making a film in America , after my travel in 2001, though. But what became pivotal, was that I believed that I would make time to look into family and the 19th century as fuel with which to consider times at large, limitations at large, the idea of large monetary global cycles and the arrival again of war.
John O'Shea. Producer and Advertiser and a significant advocate for the New Zealand Film Commission. John Reid. Director. New Zealand. Online image.
My films summary
FILM NO 1.
Right. Still: Joan Lyes in the student documentary that I produced I Want to be Joan (1977) .
This film was all private distribution after a Premiere.
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. Above. The image of Joan Lyes, that I manipulated, who spoke in the documentary. This was selected for the cover of Alter Image: feminism and representation in New Zealand art 1973-1993, curated by Christina Barton and Deborah Lawler-Dormer Catalogue at City Gallery, Wellington, by Jan Beiringer, in 1993 for curators. *
Next. Still: Joan Lyes in the documentary I Want to be Joan (1977) Produced and Directed by Stephanie Beth.
Gouache. Untitled. Allie Eagle. 1977 ( Private Collection )
Garden party, 1976. Christchurch.
I commenced being a student at Fine Art School, Canterbury University, Christchurch. 1975
Got a bicyle job as 'postie' and carpool from Rangiora into town to school.
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NOW headquarters (National Organization for Women) where I premiered IN JOY to the Wellington contingent in 1981 on a four-screening route, John O’Shea strode down the aisle towards me and grasped my hand. “Congratulations Stephanie! That is the best short film out of New Zealand so far!” *
Father arrived a bit late that evening in Wellington city for that screening. All the food had been scoffed! It was a significant Wellington event. (The hosts were NOW the National Organization of Women) There was elation. I was chuffed that dad was present. We had a wonderful night together. It was the only time dad saw something that I made. I stopped making films for twenty years after this experience. I was not interested nor suited to enter the commercial or advertising world. Instead, I took up part-time media teaching to young adults. I still maintained a lifetime choice to work part time with film as I had ‘caught the bug ‘. I wanted to be able to ponder life at my private pace.
My dad was not averse to driving to Wellington. He was less often a traveler to Auckland, but he did know that his daughters were busy in the Arts, his first daughter, Angela, in music with children. Here I was now spending up large. Thinking about this now, it is strange how I recognize that dad was an investor in that film. He’d loaned me 10K. He knew that he wasn’t going to get it back. I guess I knew that as well. Celluloid is a seduction. That for dad seemed to whet his curiosity. He visited both cities to see me during those times, in full support. His attendance to my emotional space was a real gift.
It is weird to think that asking for 10K from Dad was just an equivalent of asking for six to a dozen tubes of acrylic paints or oils or chisels from a traditional student point of view to complete four years of practice. There is no doubt that in our twenties we all push ourselves to risk and reach. I had chosen an expensive student path. David went to America and Canada during 1980, for the five months whilst I was in a ‘movie role’. He could see his friends and family and keep well away. He returned near the completion of the edit and the premiere screening. I screened IN JOY in Christchurch town three days after John Lennon was murdered. There, in America, was a lonely and isolated killer seeking “glory”.
Having made my second documentary film quite quickly upon the back of the first, I knew that after the late seventies there would be no ‘on the road’ experience for distribution. I was worn out after the first experience of wandering around the countryside. The culture had shifted, privatized and divided too. Inflation in the 1980s was high. Energy diverted to politicization for many. Hosts who had once been available to me for billets during “Joan” screenings - were often swept up in Anti- apartheid and anti-smelter activities. Camera operators were now hiding footage under beds and secreting it to editors, when possible, for the important documentary of 1980, the protest apartheid during the Springbok rugby Tour of ‘81 (Mita’s Bastion Point: Day 507. 1980, with Gerd Polman and Leon Narbey). The 1980s forged along. A funding body grew its investment money (The New Zealand Film Commission, established 1978). I, a small outsider player, branched away to stay working discreetly in part-time teaching, enjoy years of cinema as an audience member and shooting video weddings on weekends to keep up the cash flow.
The 16mm poetic films that Maurice Askew, my teacher at Fine Arts School in Christchurch showed me in my student years (1975 – 8) were all from mid twentieth century Europe. Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) was my exposure to the holocaust.
Danto's words were an anchoring field of reading to me, reminding me how to ask the questions, not What is Art? But how do we discuss Art? 62 Vis a vis Danto, was I going to spend some time wondering about life’s trajectory right back from the long continental war to within the authorities of absolute power, to new ideas of the State.
Father arrived a bit late that evening in Wellington city for that screening. All the food had been scoffed! It was a significant Wellington event. (The hosts were NOW the National Organization of Women) There was elation. I was chuffed that dad was present. We had a wonderful night together. It was the only time dad saw something that I made. I stopped making films for twenty years after this experience. I was not interested nor suited to enter the commercial or advertising world. Instead, I took up part-time media teaching to young adults. I still maintained a lifetime choice to work part time with film as I had ‘caught the bug ‘. I wanted to be able to ponder life at my private pace.
My dad was not averse to driving to Wellington. He was less often a traveler to Auckland, but he did know that his daughters were busy in the Arts, his first daughter, Angela, in music with children. Here I was now spending up large. Thinking about this now, it is strange how I recognize that dad was an investor in that film. He’d loaned me 10K. He knew that he wasn’t going to get it back. I guess I knew that as well. Celluloid is a seduction. That for dad seemed to whet his curiosity. He visited both cities to see me during those times, in full support. His attendance to my emotional space was a real gift.
It is weird to think that asking for 10K from Dad was just an equivalent of asking for six to a dozen tubes of acrylic paints or oils or chisels from a traditional student point of view to complete four years of practice. There is no doubt that in our twenties we all push ourselves to risk and reach. I had chosen an expensive student path. David went to America and Canada during 1980, for the five months whilst I was in a ‘movie role’. He could see his friends and family and keep well away. He returned near the completion of the edit and the premiere screening. I screened IN JOY in Christchurch town three days after John Lennon was murdered. There, in America, was a lonely and isolated killer seeking “glory”.
Having made my second documentary film quite quickly upon the back of the first, I knew that after the late seventies there would be no ‘on the road’ experience for distribution. I was worn out after the first experience of wandering around the countryside. The culture had shifted, privatized and divided too. Inflation in the 1980s was high. Energy diverted to politicization for many. Hosts who had once been available to me for billets during “Joan” screenings - were often swept up in Anti- apartheid and anti-smelter activities. Camera operators were now hiding footage under beds and secreting it to editors, when possible, for the important documentary of 1980, the protest apartheid during the Springbok rugby Tour of ‘81 (Mita’s Bastion Point: Day 507. 1980, with Gerd Polman and Leon Narbey). The 1980s forged along. A funding body grew its investment money (The New Zealand Film Commission, established 1978). I, a small outsider player, branched away to stay working discreetly in part-time teaching, enjoy years of cinema as an audience member and shooting video weddings on weekends to keep up the cash flow.
The 16mm poetic films that Maurice Askew, my teacher at Fine Arts School in Christchurch showed me in my student years (1975 – 8) were all from mid twentieth century Europe. Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) was my exposure to the holocaust.
Danto's words were an anchoring field of reading to me, reminding me how to ask the questions, not What is Art? But how do we discuss Art? 62 Vis a vis Danto, was I going to spend some time wondering about life’s trajectory right back from the long continental war to within the authorities of absolute power, to new ideas of the State.
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After Rangiora we lived at the Wood Brother Mill. Our TV office inside that we rented out. 1984 - 1995
We moved from living on the first floor above the Mill, after that, to up on the Scarborough Hills for four years in 1983.
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David and I visited Dad in the summer of 1981/82 in Hawkes Bay
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The first Russian that I ever saw was the dancer Nureyev. I saw Fonteyn and Nureyev dancing Swan Lake in London in June 1971. It was a real event to see the famous ballet pair. It was also an electric fact, firstly, that Nureyev was a defector and, then, as knowledge came much later, that Fonteyn's husband was a Panamanian revolutionary. ( the second feature I only learnt about early 21st Century ).
The second man in my recollection was a Russian speaker from Ukraine who sat beside me in a couchette with four others as I entered Paris from Milan in 2001 after my one marvelous Italian holiday I had after attending a film conference in London on Godard. It was a rainy day. A spirit of excitement burst forth as the train approached the city. Everyone started sharing their nibbles and toasting our imminent arrival. This man was a scientist from Kiev, so excited to be in Paris for the first time. He was to attend a science conference. I will not forget this burst of student spirit. Moments later, the festive excitement of arriving in Paris engulfed us all. People in the queue waited patiently for taxi cabs. The gutters rushed with water. There were squeals and laughter as sloshes of water soaked our shoes. No complaining present. Paris still does this to people.
The second man in my recollection was a Russian speaker from Ukraine who sat beside me in a couchette with four others as I entered Paris from Milan in 2001 after my one marvelous Italian holiday I had after attending a film conference in London on Godard. It was a rainy day. A spirit of excitement burst forth as the train approached the city. Everyone started sharing their nibbles and toasting our imminent arrival. This man was a scientist from Kiev, so excited to be in Paris for the first time. He was to attend a science conference. I will not forget this burst of student spirit. Moments later, the festive excitement of arriving in Paris engulfed us all. People in the queue waited patiently for taxi cabs. The gutters rushed with water. There were squeals and laughter as sloshes of water soaked our shoes. No complaining present. Paris still does this to people.
Travels in Mexico
In 1972, David and I journeyed to Mexico. David had travelled there previously in 1965 and already had acquaintances in the area. We spent three months there. At that time, he was very much the guitar-carrying man, his substantial book filled with a collection of folk songs he had written down. Thanks to David’s connections and familiarity, I was introduced into a lively and welcoming scene, and I was embraced warmly by those around us.We spent time with the Frosts, Joan and John. John, an artist and photographer, and his partner, Joan Frost (née Van Every). They welcomed us for days and days of afternoon conversations and outings. Our arrival coincided with the vibrant chaos of an annual festival, where the sky erupted in a cacophony of firecrackers. We navigated the rubble road, entering a sparkling, smoky atmosphere, and were met with a brilliant display of smiles and greetings. During our stay I had the invaluable opportunity to learn how to print black and white photographs in John Frost ’s studio, a skill that would serve me well in years to come.
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Stephanie. 1984.
HUMANITIES
Robert Bresson made The Diary of a Country Priest in 1951. There is an interesting essay in 2006 by Wanda Avila about Bresson’s capacity to explore Transcendent Films. 63 ‘If that film can impress us as a masterpiece and this with an almost physical impact, if it moves the critic and the uncritical alike, it is primarily because of its power to stir the emotions, rather than the intelligence, at their highest level of sensitivity.’ 64 1950 was over seventy years ago. Transcendent experiences continue to be in the cultural frame for many people who appreciate this thematic development. André Bazin had things to say about film. His writing was important early Film theory. He explored the notion of realism of film image. Bresson was under Bazin’s watch, what I could see of his work, were different exemplars to me. Bazin favoured the long camera take for realism.
ROMANCE
Bresson, instead, began to cut in mid shot and close shot in steady unimpassioned edits. He created ideas for audience scope, filming people as models of character abstracts instead of filming acting. 65 Bresson, instead, began to cut in mid shot and close shot in steady unimpassioned edits. He created ideas for audience scope, filming people as models of character abstracts instead of filming “Among the fundamental filmmaking principles advocated for in the book, Bresson argues that "cinematography" (French: le cinématographe) is the highest, even a transcendent, function of cinema. While a conventional movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre that privileges the performances of "actors", cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds that incorporates what he calls "models" instead of actors. He succinctly defines the difference between the two:HUMAN MODELS: movement from the exterior to the interior...ACTORS: movement from the interior to the exterior.’( (Wiki Notes ) 66
Lancelot du Lac. Robert Bresson. 1974
Jocotopec. 1972. Photograph by Stephanie Beth
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Dad and David. Hawkes Bay. 1982
Taylors Mistake. Canterbury. Home 1983 -1988 68
David, Alecia and I. Ocean Beach. San Francisco. 1984
Shooting Video weddings phase. 1984- 1988
Son, Tom Robinson. 9 Otley Street. 1990
Tom. Cheviot. 1997
Niece Amity Tiffen. Akaroa. 1996
2001I have been able to work a little with the apparatus of moving image culture.
I took a flight to London in 2001 to attend a conference at the Tate Modern. This conference was Forever Godard. I bought the complete ECM CD set: Four books written by GODARD. This collection was his 1990s obsession.’ HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA . Listenig to the discs gave me the idea of what was going on in his head’. Godard intrigued me as the first fanatic of film I had encountered. It was to think about a filmmaker who had started as an experimenter, gained some notoriety and then challenged himself about what to do next. To go to the TATE MODERN and to think about why and how he lived working hard, but reclusively for his last thirty years of life, was interesting. A Sample of Godard text that accompanies Audio editing of Godard’s Histoire:
Chapiter quatre(a)Le contrôle de l’univers,
CD Disc 4ECM New SeriesHISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
Edited sections:any art form is there for the artist to interpret it in his own wayand thus create an emotionliterature can do it by the way the language is usedor the words are put together(9)
The public aren’t aware of what we call montage (11)
Lastly, I think of their silky noise,solitary and quiet, of a fire being consumedas it highlights the whole roomand talking to itselfor talking to mebut almost for itself(36)
the mind is only realwhen it manifests the presencemakes itself manifest orshows its handwhen the word is destroyedwhen it’s no longer a giftmade by one to anotherThat involves something of ‘his’ essenceit’s human friendship that's being destroyed(37)
that miserylast argument last foundation of the modern communityit's the backdrop to all our dramasto our thoughts, to our actionsand even our utopias(38)
true violence is the deed of the mindevery creative act contains a real threatto the man who has dared to perform itThe act is the judge of time(40)
perhaps there are ten thousand peoplewho haven’t forgotten Cezanne’s applebut there must be a billion spectators
who will remember the lighterof the stranger on the trainand the reason why Alfred Hitchcock becamethe only poète maudit to meet with successwas that he was the creator of formsof the twentieth century
and its forms that tell us finallywhat lies at the bottom of thingsnow, what is art if not that through which form becomes styleand what is styleif it isn't the man(43)
only the cinema has seenthat if everyone is doing his jobthe composition looks after itself 45)
there it is nowI’m at your disposalsince I am (48)
in “I think therefore I am” the I of “I am” is no longer the sameas the I of “I think”whybecause it still has to be demonstratedthat there is a relationship between the body and the mindbetween thought and existencethe feeling of existence that I haveis not yet a selfit’s an unconsidered feelingit’s born within mebut without me(49) Jean Luc Godard. 1998 69https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire(s)_du_cin%C3%A9ma
Chapiter quatre(a)Le contrôle de l’univers,
CD Disc 4ECM New SeriesHISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
Edited sections:any art form is there for the artist to interpret it in his own wayand thus create an emotionliterature can do it by the way the language is usedor the words are put together(9)
The public aren’t aware of what we call montage (11)
Lastly, I think of their silky noise,solitary and quiet, of a fire being consumedas it highlights the whole roomand talking to itselfor talking to mebut almost for itself(36)
the mind is only realwhen it manifests the presencemakes itself manifest orshows its handwhen the word is destroyedwhen it’s no longer a giftmade by one to anotherThat involves something of ‘his’ essenceit’s human friendship that's being destroyed(37)
that miserylast argument last foundation of the modern communityit's the backdrop to all our dramasto our thoughts, to our actionsand even our utopias(38)
true violence is the deed of the mindevery creative act contains a real threatto the man who has dared to perform itThe act is the judge of time(40)
perhaps there are ten thousand peoplewho haven’t forgotten Cezanne’s applebut there must be a billion spectators
who will remember the lighterof the stranger on the trainand the reason why Alfred Hitchcock becamethe only poète maudit to meet with successwas that he was the creator of formsof the twentieth century
and its forms that tell us finallywhat lies at the bottom of thingsnow, what is art if not that through which form becomes styleand what is styleif it isn't the man(43)
only the cinema has seenthat if everyone is doing his jobthe composition looks after itself 45)
there it is nowI’m at your disposalsince I am (48)
in “I think therefore I am” the I of “I am” is no longer the sameas the I of “I think”whybecause it still has to be demonstratedthat there is a relationship between the body and the mindbetween thought and existencethe feeling of existence that I haveis not yet a selfit’s an unconsidered feelingit’s born within mebut without me(49) Jean Luc Godard. 1998 69https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire(s)_du_cin%C3%A9ma
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Toronto to Kelowna over the Rockies. 2019
FEMINISM: two films in the late 1970s
The headspace I am in in 2024 at this point is, ‘self in a world of global complexity, tripping along, reading, noticing and still integrating learning syntaxes.’
In 1977 I was commissioned to look into issues for Feminism. “I Want to be Joan “(1977), was a documentary that I shot during the United Women’s Convention of 1977, in Christchurch). Material revealed how the lack of reform of attitudes and awareness in society was still isolating some women. Barbara’s story was a rebuilding of a personal tale of success. Barbara felt confident that she would reach a moderate middle ground with her partner, who had beaten her once after the couple attended counselling, conversed and shared her life more honestly. Once she knew that he knew that others knew that he had a temper issue, life could be improved. Furthering education for everyone became an answer. ( correctives.co.nz/ I Want to be Joan)I remember the 1979 Hamilton Women’s Convention insurrection. The event gave fuel to Māori women to become activists. I remember watch Donna Awatere and Ripeka Evans in action with a microphone, no doubt having been fueled by new readings of Leftist literature. * Marti Friedlander arrived in New Zealand as a Jewish migrant from England in1958. A frank remark of hers about her life here. In 2011 she said “I was so incredibly lonely, and I thought to myself, look around you, Marti. There are other migrants here. They're feeling the same. Why don't you take a biography in photographs of this strange country? And that's how it all began."70 Marti made several photographs at that 1979 meet. I met her over a cup a tea in Auckland, a few days later. Conventions for women of the old shape ended that year. Rosemary Seymour, a senior lecturer in Sociology at Waikato University, whom I asked to host IN JOY in 1981, gave me assurance that the study of women would be formalised in universities. **71 Rumbles from workers in the country were happening. One example: at 3.30pm on Saturday December 5, 1981, Ann Waddell and 26 of her colleagues walked out of the Rixon clothing factory in Levin”. 72 I hitched a ride up to Auckland the day that the 1979 convention collapsed as a plenary type of structure. I was heading there to have a first meeting with Maggie Eyre to put up a sounding board for my 1980 film. The subtlety of IN JOY (1980) lay in its concise approach, presenting a focused exploration through a unique perspective on improvisational drama. ( Correctives.co.nz/ Director) Vis a vis employment matters, I wanted to make sure to hire Diane Twiss as sound recordist. At that time, she was a known female industry pioneer in sound recording. Maggie and I did a clown workshop in early 1980 before the film shoot. I joined this too, for four days. It was held in the Limbs Dance studio in Auckland. Maggie, competent, sits down on Queen Street for a workshop ‘twosome.’ That image went into the BETH/ZUSTERS calendar of 1981.
* Allie Eagle. (1949-2022) artist. In 2018, Donna Awatere Huata became a Māori climate change commissioner. “Awatere Huata said she would focus on three main "Pou": representing the interests of landowners, bringing Māori worldview into the climate change discussion, and sharing conversations with indigenous peoples around the world.”
**Seymour was instrumental in helping to establish the Sociology Department at the University of Waikato and the first Women's Studies Department in New Zealand. ‘Seymour first studied English literature at Auckland University College and later moved into the Social Science field. In 1981, she earned her PhD for her doctoral thesis titled Women at stake: ideological crosscurrents in misogyny and philogyny.
**Seymour was instrumental in helping to establish the Sociology Department at the University of Waikato and the first Women's Studies Department in New Zealand. ‘Seymour first studied English literature at Auckland University College and later moved into the Social Science field. In 1981, she earned her PhD for her doctoral thesis titled Women at stake: ideological crosscurrents in misogyny and philogyny.
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IN JOY film. 1980. Dinner and accommodation provided to all participants for four night and days.(That was dress-up night)
At dinner. From Left. Participant Marilyn Suttcliff, Maggie Eyre, self. Photogograph by Jane Zusters.
This still (Exercise #8 from the last IN JOY workshop shooting day) is not in the film. It is taken seconds after the film scene wrapped. I title it “Archetype.” The participant from the workshop broke the proscenium arch giving a personal gaze to the still camera. That camera was active as the documenter of the on camera and off camera process of the film being made, with a different goal than the film camera which was only instructed to film the participants in performance. A female , now out of character from the film ( or not) confronting the ‘camera eye. Watch the character progress in the film. 73
What promptings from culture fueled her expression one may ask. (It is of interest to note, also, that a pregnant woman was a participant in the workshops for IN JOY)
Students in prepare to entertain at an old people's home. Their Saturdays performance class teacher Maggie Eyre.
The last photo I made of Dad laughing with me. Elmshill. 1989.
Colosseum. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2001
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*Pig Fern: Home garden: Spring. (Our section had been a cow farm in the 1930’s. The pig fern became the site of our son’s trampoline. Tom jumped for many years. The black gauze above the soil, had provided a microclimate by then. The ferns self-regenerated... Photographs by Stephanie Beth. 1994 and 2024
Christchurch Earthquake. Online images. 2011
David was working on the 18th floor of this building when the Christchurch Earthquake 2011 struck. The building had been his office site for fifteen years. Before this, his office had been down the street at the corner for eight years. which partially collapsed. On the corner, down the road from David's previous 16th floor office (1998 - 2004) victims of the quake succeed in escaping that office by abseiling. The building is now a hotel. I was caught on the third floor of a paring lot that day. As I crawled to the exist, orange dust billowed past the Building layers. The orange brick colour was the clue. The Cathedral tower had fallen.
In 2016 I screened US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY at Govett Brewster Art Gallery Cinema, New Plymouth.
CIRCUIT film and Video. New Zealand.
Conference collaborators. CIRCUIT and AUT Documentary group.
The Time of the Now. 2018. 74Curator: Erika Balsom.
I was invited to make a short presentation at the conference at AUT in Auckland in 2018 about my first two films. This was a rare, enjoyable occasion. I moved from general obscurity back into art space again. I briefly introduced myself to the conference by mentioning my two early films.I followed up with an essay on the site. https://www.circuit.org.nz/writing-and-podcast/e-book-the-time-of-the-now I popped into the Auckland Art Gallery for a cup of tea on one of the days. I went to the WALTERS PRIZE exhibition for a couple of hours. Walters was the first contemporary artist to integrate indigeneity and the postmodern in vernacular Fine Art in the country. I made sure to go and see the short-listed grouping. It had not yet been announced that Ruth Buchanan had won the prize. Buchanan included a Women’s Art room of print, painting, media and audio cassettes in the basement down from her exhibition as being empathetically and historically in line with her research.
She had lived several years in Berlin. This exhibition originated at Adam Gallery in Wellington, then had been reassembled in Toi O Tāmaki. At Adam she had aligned her interest of study with two German women, Judith Hopf and Marianne Wex in 2016. Her perception with architecture and language provided the country with a very fresh view of.. let's say... libraries, archives, museums. She made a contention that traditional institutional learning spaces required a review. Her work critiqued space use. I was impressed. A couple of written guidelines stated:
‘From sculpture to architecture, painting to design, performance to audio, manifesto to poetry, Buchanan brings together politics, feminism and the body, arranged in a processual, open and speculative way. It considers competing, overlapping and contradictory modes of representation, both visual and verbal, aural and spatial.’‘BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS is a tour de force of language itself, not so much framed as an efficient means of communication, but as a fantasy of “bad visual systems.”’75I walked past the curtain walls and noted video screens of text at the Toi o Tamaki version. The winner of the prize, Buchanan would go on to accept a return to New Zealand to be director of Artspace, Auckland in 2022. * Hats off to Buchanan from me when she was asked to describe a favorite Art installation in Auckland, she chose Michael Parekowhai's state house, The Lighthouse, built at 1.1 scale. 76
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Hanging curtain. Part of BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS 2017. By Ruth Buchanan. Auckland Art Gallery. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2018 77
*The adjudicator of the prize for Walters was from Brazil, Adriano Pedrosa, the 2018 International judge.
My small specialty with documentary had already become the question of provocative audio. What is said and what is not said, not what is made, painted, sculpted, textured, danced or shown.
I listened to myself speaking about shooting video weddings in 1984
I listened to myself speaking about shooting video weddings in 1984
During my 2023 holiday to Brisbane at QAGOMA, I spent an hour hour looking at Zavros. Then paintings by Ex de Medici who was announced as a mid-career artist: Beautiful Wickedness 78 This artist was a standout. She works with precision. For ten years she was a tattoo artist after painting with oils had affected her health. After this she adapted to watercolour in fine detail. There was an interesting video interview with her about her obsession with violence. The Australian military had commissioned Ex de Medici to do work for the peace keeping force based in the Solomon Islands in 2000 and 2003.
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* There were some astonishing works in both exhibitions at Goama. Artist, Zavros, had cajoled his own children into participation in his matrix of critique about the downfalls of Narcissism, and more.
I trained to be a volunteer guide at the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2019. I had never been a volunteer in my life. I knew that I was characteristically terrible. When I was eight, I went off to my first Brownies camp. Asked twice to peel a whole lot of potatoes I rang my mother and said that I wanted to come home. I thought that this adult volunteering would be like an echo of my later serious younger self back when I looked at Art on walls, something I had hardly done at all after 1977. I started writing Art Bites (volunteer talk on a work of Art) in the Gallery. These had to be about 2-Dimensional Art, on the whole. I specifically focused on the New Zealander representatives at the Venice Biennales.
I found ways to correlate artists in paint and photography; some 3D in rubber and computer installation and then, finally, in film as per incentives of Maori ‘Moving Image’, when film from Maori at last arrived at Art space during the five years of giving talks. The speaking activities were at the regional Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
Japonica. Winter Garden. Home. 2024
I decided to make my first talk about the Artist Simon Denny ( 1982 - )
Simon Denny received the Walters Prize in 2014.
In 2015 he was invited to represent New Zealand at Venice Biennale.
The Installation artist Simon Denny (1982 -) became my first topic in 2019 for an Art Bite talk.Denny in 2012 described himself as a ‘post-contemporary, post internet, post capitalist artist’.
Denny has been right at the edge of the thinking curve for a long time. He was enticed by a New Zealand journalist to return to NZ and engage in a project in 2017. This was since the very high status response he received a the Venice Biennale of 2015. The journalist asked him to make a creative response to Peter Thiel being spotted in New Zealand in 2019. Theil had become a recent New Zealand citizen and was an investor in Palantir. This was years before Trump signed on for it use.80 I had been back and forth to America between 2009 and 2011 producing the documentary ( US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY ) ( correctives.co.nz/Issues one & two ) . I had witnessed and felt an awareness of technology developments there' The Silicon Valley' effect. Candles burnt for Steve Jobs outside on the grounds beside the glass walls of new Apple shops in L.A. when I was there is October 2011. The buzz about acceleration of computer technologies artisan designing, engineering system upgrades and App developments, was all in the terrain. Art writer Anthony Byrt (living in Berlin at the same time as Denny)wrote a compelling article about Denny. He came to Christchurch to introduce Founder’s Paradox (2017/2018), hosted by the curator then, Lara Strongman. I put my energy to the exhibition with great interest.This is the question I threw out to the Gallery audience in this Art Bite. ( correctives.co.nz/Art bites) CHECK LINKS TO CORRECTIVES SUFFIXES ON THE ALL CONTENT PAGEe.g ART BITES
Christchurch had been a town with a gasworks. This had meant hellish winters. The gas works had closed in the mid-1970s. Some of us who went to Art School did drawings that connected. I remember sticking red poles in the slag for photographs. I also remember getting bronchitis every winter. The plant was decommissioned in 1982.
Fifteen or so years later in Addington, apartment blocks and commercial buildings began to spring up. We moved into the Mill when it was entirely amidst unrealized dreams, nevertheless, several other people’s dreams. The principal lease at the old building was with a man who lived atop the property with his fantasy to create a select restaurant there, though this would have required a five-story elevator. He was Clive Brooker. Clive for a while, settled into the sweet laying of recycled bricks in a papyrus pattern for the front courtyard. Six years later he vanished to share life with his partner who ran an Art Gallery and Museum in Hamilton. We rattled blithely on one floor up, music wafting with ease from reel-to-reel tape recorder, letting events play out. Music in life was a continuum from the ’70s. The commanding lyricists of the decade were a hard chapter to leave behind or supersede.
The first floor where we slept had been an artist studio in the 1960’s. Don Peebles had once used the upstairs space. Peebles was a teacher at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, and he was my first-year tutor.
Peebles had reached for and found his raison d’ Etre after an exhilarating time in New York in the early 1960’s, an experience that secured him a glorious preoccupation for the rest of his life presumably after his mad keen curious youth. 81 People can see examples of his work in homes and institutions all over the country. (Appendix I) He worked in a kind of post- painterly range of abstract assemblages - relief constructions. I liked drawing under Peeble’s supervision. He used to string great sheets of three-ply timber over the grass for sketching exercises.
Knowing that Peebles had grabbed the thrill of years of art making in New York and that his experience with the Art scene ambience would have given him good moments of exaltation, gave me assurance that he was a happy, dedicated practitioner who carried with him his applause that a life of passion for experimenting and hard work brought him such a satisfaction.
Features of Town. The Canterbury provincial council chamber designed by Benjamin Mountford and completed in 1865 was the finest example of the high Victorian Gothic revival style of architecture in New Zealand. The richness of its interior mirrored the wealth and optimism of Canterbury at that time. The building was made of local stone and timber (kauri and Rimu). The chamber collapsed in the February 2011 earthquake example of Heritage Architecture in Christchurch. 100 In 2024 it was fully restored.
David and I in 1981 were considering our next move after a very peak chapter of life in a satellite town, Rangiora. That had been a tremendous place with friends for four years. The experience had set the bar high on all forward levels of action. It had been a time of peer group family. We loved living at the Mill, leaving Peebles’s studio spacious, as is, just putting in bed and a few apple boxes for furniture. We had a commercial timber board as a ‘round table’ tooled up. The majestic space upstairs was two rooms of size with whitewash walls and jarrah timber ceiling beams. We renovated an office below. We got in a pair of old steel grey ship’s safe doors from the wrecker’s yard, to cover the windows on the ground floor and built a studio office.
Fifteen or so years later in Addington, apartment blocks and commercial buildings began to spring up. We moved into the Mill when it was entirely amidst unrealized dreams, nevertheless, several other people’s dreams. The principal lease at the old building was with a man who lived atop the property with his fantasy to create a select restaurant there, though this would have required a five-story elevator. He was Clive Brooker. Clive for a while, settled into the sweet laying of recycled bricks in a papyrus pattern for the front courtyard. Six years later he vanished to share life with his partner who ran an Art Gallery and Museum in Hamilton. We rattled blithely on one floor up, music wafting with ease from reel-to-reel tape recorder, letting events play out. Music in life was a continuum from the ’70s. The commanding lyricists of the decade were a hard chapter to leave behind or supersede.
The first floor where we slept had been an artist studio in the 1960’s. Don Peebles had once used the upstairs space. Peebles was a teacher at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, and he was my first-year tutor.
Peebles had reached for and found his raison d’ Etre after an exhilarating time in New York in the early 1960’s, an experience that secured him a glorious preoccupation for the rest of his life presumably after his mad keen curious youth. 81 People can see examples of his work in homes and institutions all over the country. (Appendix I) He worked in a kind of post- painterly range of abstract assemblages - relief constructions. I liked drawing under Peeble’s supervision. He used to string great sheets of three-ply timber over the grass for sketching exercises.
Knowing that Peebles had grabbed the thrill of years of art making in New York and that his experience with the Art scene ambience would have given him good moments of exaltation, gave me assurance that he was a happy, dedicated practitioner who carried with him his applause that a life of passion for experimenting and hard work brought him such a satisfaction.
Features of Town. The Canterbury provincial council chamber designed by Benjamin Mountford and completed in 1865 was the finest example of the high Victorian Gothic revival style of architecture in New Zealand. The richness of its interior mirrored the wealth and optimism of Canterbury at that time. The building was made of local stone and timber (kauri and Rimu). The chamber collapsed in the February 2011 earthquake example of Heritage Architecture in Christchurch. 100 In 2024 it was fully restored.
David and I in 1981 were considering our next move after a very peak chapter of life in a satellite town, Rangiora. That had been a tremendous place with friends for four years. The experience had set the bar high on all forward levels of action. It had been a time of peer group family. We loved living at the Mill, leaving Peebles’s studio spacious, as is, just putting in bed and a few apple boxes for furniture. We had a commercial timber board as a ‘round table’ tooled up. The majestic space upstairs was two rooms of size with whitewash walls and jarrah timber ceiling beams. We renovated an office below. We got in a pair of old steel grey ship’s safe doors from the wrecker’s yard, to cover the windows on the ground floor and built a studio office.
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Wood Brothers Mill outside our next home and office. 1982 - 1984
DOCTOR GEORGE MONTEITH
I projected myself into seeing my great, great grandfather as interested in advances in sciences, medicine. He lived in the days before, to say the least, penicillin or MRI scans. (Appendix 1.1. correctives.co.nz/ Appendix1.1.) One of his local experiences was to do research into the use of aether in support of resuscitation procedures. That was a topical worry - the dangers surrounding near drowning. He advertised himself as a doctor first and was a coroner before he died. Considering his times, a recent doctor acquaintance working at the local hospital, working in hospital germs control pointed out to me recently, ‘doctors then just basically used some old remedies and made a few splints for broken bones’.
George was compelled by curiosity and research. He lived before Oxford or Cambridge formally embraced/integrated notions of learning from ancient medicinal wisdoms in Germany, France and England. He first trained so he could run an Apothecary. He did this near Birmingham in the 1830s. George did his first training as people do now by studying ‘online’ - study as a self-driven initiative, reading current documents and writing meticulous notes. I found it delightful to consider how important the postal service was. When I was at university in the mid 1970’s I paid my fees by riding around on a bike delivering mail for the Post Office. When he awaited medical journals from London or Boston via the Suez, medical texts were carried by boat, by dromedary, then on to Sydney and then finally to New Zealand. 82
I am a browser. On one of our bookshelves sits The Republic. (Plato) purchased in 1968 and another copy that found its way there somehow. 83
The Confessions Rousseau 1790: The business of neurosis. Purchased 1997. 84
Note. Look up the Illustration Service to St John’s Advertisement. UK, 1940.commissioned Artwork by Doris-Zinkeisen. 85
Timothy Snyder. Lecturing to Yale Students. c 2024
When I was born in 1948 my family structure was intact and materially flourishing. No family member had anything to say but that the future ahead was bright, positive, fair with active economic trade. My self-portrait grows out of reflections upon the optimisms and feelings of life experience and relationships. Growing with some logic and then also with an open mind.
When I was the little girl who learned a little about my ancestors, I felt that I was invited into the opportunity to continue thoughts, feelings and ideas. By this I mean that I was taught customs and traditions. This meant living according to cultural form and in my case by getting married. When David and I went travelling together we put a lot of time into conversing as well as loitering in different habitats. Yes,” we're all here by hook or by crook” I would think. How is everyone coping? I would ask. There is surely not an even playing field. A blatant realization was that we were both of colonial English stock. I was also a girl at school caroused with exploratory reading of material supplied by an English teacher affected well by early modernist writing. It was Miriam who took the class of eight girls, two carloads it would have been then, to see ULYSSES in Hastings fifteen months before it was officially a segregated screening. In 1965 separate screenings for men and women was what was offered.85 I deduce now that Hastings would have been a test case theatre before official censorship restrictions were applied that year. I took my summer holiday at Mahia Peninsula in 1967. I was bubbling and shy with the excitement of going for a cup of tea at my past teacher’s place. On the shoreline I saw an albatross skeleton, a full wingspan clung by some feathers. The feathers, the skeleton and the weathered wood branches were poetry. I had not been exposed to the Wasteland (Eliot) but I had read at my school desk, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock. * *The ‘shall I wear my trousers rolled ‘poem. The character in the poem, The Wasteland, was wracked by anxieties. This was the idea I began to gather about adults. Many of the adults before me had at least one war in their ‘real lives’ . These create such plummets of the soul. I knew my parents were from the generation that suffered war, what they carried through as their own ideas of calm and happiness were affected by audio tales of war and poetry of war and procedural life from after the point of 1915 and then 1941 onwards. I always noted my father’s practical disciplines: shutting doors to not waste heat, turning off lights, not being a consumer of excess. For example, my mother bought a gold rimmed English dinner set for ‘best.’ I noted how quickly he moved it out of his house when he was on his own. I bought Hogarth Press reprints of many English writers e.g. Orwell and Woolf. T.S. Eliot was a determined classicist noting the Modern. He, in collaboration with fellow American poet and editor Ezra Pound, published a new kind of collage poem composed of fragments from many languages and mythologies. Locale London England’ 86
When I started travelling, I knew I required a visual template for comprehension of the recent historical past on all counts of thought and comprehension. Modernism did not really sit until I saw architecture, highways, fabrics, glassware and Art. I detached enough to watch the adults of the past rising in the thick of it all. I grew to realize that much of human social activity is enjoyed because of its refinements, its institutions and the principles of social exchange. It is no small wonder that cuisine took center stage in the moments that civilizations evolve out of agriculture. Agriculture kept people alive. It gave the scope for daylight time and nighttime events specifically around seasons. Humans cultivate thanks and respect for food energy. I realized that Art was in use of metaphor and had had to deal with horror. When my first ancestral family couple arrived (the Monteiths) the Māori population was 80,000 and the pakeha about 2,050. 87 When I was born one hundred and eight years later, the European population in the country was tipping near two million, Maori 111.769.
As a child I was told stories about my relative, Henry Tiffen and his niece, Amelia. ( More in Appendices ) Also, quite clearly, the facts of his two dead wives. A big ‘settler’ map was pinned on the wall in the summer seaside bach (cottage) lounge. I knew that Henry made capital and that his young first wife died just two weeks following the birth and death of their only child. The female story appeared quite simplistically to be the outcome of giving birth. It was the story of sexuality in the context of natal herstories. Some babies are stillborn. Some mothers die giving birth. Some and both survive into adulthood. These are the facts.
During the 1970s influential experiences I needed to hear voices to begin to better comprehend the larger human world. For example, the taxi drivers we hired told us so much about the core sense of sadness in Thai citizenry because of regional war. Bangkok, where we stayed for four days in 1970, was a town for American soldiers on R & R from the Vietnam War. Kabul felt timid with pockets of the desperately hopeful when we passed through there…. Women I met in tourism there were Westernizing with smiles. One man entertained us with tea in the big international hotel in 1970. He called in an oud player to provide an enjoyable evening of charming entertainment. That hotel (the Intercontinental) was suddenly turned into an inferno in 2018. When I came back to New Zealand, I saw my father and all my family again. My first ecstatic happiness at an earthy level towards a grounded life in New Zealand was to smell and hear the sea in a bay just south of Kaikoura. This is the area where whales feed very close to shore. Fifteen or so years later I enjoyed a little kayaking up there, seaweeds swirling in the rolling swells. I saw and went on an early trip out to watch whale’s dive. I strongly recall my childhood contentment in waves and rock pools. I was, however, by 1976, fully taken in with the accoutrement and the stories coming across on film reels, those of revolutions, past and the experiments that were going on to disrupt narrative. At age twenty-six, I looked seriously at the Film Arts. Film study with teacher Maurice Askew was exciting. 88 Also, the enjoyment of questions and words from philosopher Dennis Dutton kept opening doors. Dutton enjoyed conversation. 89 Becoming an emerging adult, I began to draw upon thoughts about truths. I saw the early Gance film ‘Bonaparte"(1927) in black and white. I saw de Laurentiis Waterloo (1970). I saw Catholic Bresson’s fantasy, Lancelot du Lac (1974). Then I saw Night and Fog (1956) by Resnais. Then I saw early Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Fellini. Filmmaking was a blast.
In my experience each time I put together a documentary I knew it was an opportunity to address themes and tropes. In retrospect each experience is primarily to portray humanity. What was fortuitous for me was, in meeting Hilde Golschmidt in Austria, I became aware of a) her, The Sphinx (1948) and, indirectly, b) her master of painting teacher, Oscar Kokoshkas’s, Self Portrait. Of a degenerate artist, (1939). Those factors gave me my starting point for reflection.90 When David and I travelled to Mexico in 1971 the beauty of the American landscape reminded us of fictions read over our youth. We went down to Monterey because we had read Steinbeck. We went down the Mississippi. We saw the riverboats. We had read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. We walked on Bourbon Street in New Orleans because we had heard blues. We went into the boreal forests in Canada because we had read, Sometimes a Great Notion (Ken Kesey) and seen the film with Paul Newman in 1971. We lived off and on in London until 1973. This was a decade before tensions were to hit Birmingham and London in black neighbourhoods. Before the street riots in 1985. It took a decade for black unrest to confront the British system, for the” Windrush generation” specifically to bring to the fore some injustices. We had friends who owned a terrace house in Brixton, London. We used to trudge up their three stories. Down at the local bar I was mesmerized to see a black man one day in spats. This was a new civvy street. It would be in 2023 that the Ghanaian, John Akomfrah, was selected to be the representative from Britain to the Venice Biennale. 2023.114 This filmmaker has made astonishing Postcolonial cinema. The Vertigo Sea (2016) was available in Christchurch in 2021. It was Important that students were reading Stuart Hall by the 1990s. A critique of Colonialism had to begin. 91
It was a foregone conclusion that the use of cameras became a cornerstone of my steps into nudging against the edge of Art, culture and society. It was thought that the Twentieth Century was going to be a practice in, ‘the middle register’, a term I picked up from an essay by Tony Judt in 2012. This became an understatement about how the Twentieth Century turned out. Judt was a New Yorker often conversing with his editor Timothy Snyder. He said, “You cannot fully appreciate the shape of the 20th Century if you did not once share its illusions”. 92 I was very conscious that the generation before me really had had a restricted time. The English had rationing for years. So too the Europeans. I grew up on available milk, meat, vegetables and playtime. Snyder had to spend much of the second decade of the Twenty first century teaching Yale undergraduate students about the semiotics of the word, Russia. I saw the recreated Tatlin Tower of 1968-9 at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 - spent hours there staring at symbols, graphics with portrayals of dreams. 93
Once I decided to write, I couldn't resist finding out about what people I had heard of wrote about. Post-war culture there had to be new and different. The Film Arts were gaining ground here in the country. My film student generation was aware of the Hayward features. (Rudall and Ramai Hayward features). The significance of Rudall Hayward was that his first sound film from 1936, inspired both Mereta Mita and Peter Wells. * ** 94
* Merita Mita Filmography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merata_Mita
** Peter Wells
wrote and produced a range of short films and a refreshing sketch on 19th Centaury norms in Society of the 19th Century, Desperate Remedies.(1992).
*Update. Nial Fergusion noted early in 2025, vis a vis the changing economic powers, that we underestimated the profundity of Tiananmen Square in China. 133
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MTG. One sole George Rowney watercolour set. Received by MTG. Donation unknown. in 1964.Photographed by Stephanie Beth. 2022