Design
Getting through the Kiwi Gothic
by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins
Why we should embrace the tea-trolley cloths and dressing-table sets at the back of the charity shop.
Church, charity and opportunity shops provide many New Zealanders with the basics of life. However, these shops, designed to provide the necessities, offer a few of life’s accessories as well. For a long time, charity shops, flea markets and garage sales have been the only readily available source of the type of design objects we now see changing hands through specialist art and design auctions. Although charity shops were once considered to be down-at-heel places into which nice people did not step, now no one much raises an eyebrow at the mention of spare time spent rummaging around in the local Sallies store.
However, among the old clothes and bric-a-brac that make up the average charity shop, a certain hierarchy still operates. Even in the world of suburban discards, “designer” rules. Canny shoppers are looking for quality “name” objects on the way down – items that have passed under the radar of the relatives who cleaned out Nanna’s house and that have found their way, almost accidentally, onto the shelves of the St Vincent de Paul. Go back 40 years and you could (so legend has it), pick up Clarice Cliff or Keith Murray pieces for a few cents. Today’s generation are looking for the stray Len Castle or Mirek Smisek pot among the shelves of abandoned night-school pottery. Tomorrow’s generation will be searching out something else again.
Goods that cannot be readily identified as the work of one person tend to collect neglected in the corners of church shops. These are the plastic kitchenware, the old
appliances and the abandoned textiles. Devote a little time to searching the piles into which the last of these have been organised and you will discover an incredible range of enchanting hand-embroidered linen napkins, tablecloths, aprons and dressing-table sets. The quality is high and the prices are low. Yet, what to do with them? Where do these things fit into our contemporary lives? After all, it’s easy enough to admire a hand-embroidered dressing-table mat, but how many people use these any more?
Satirist and cartoonist Rosemary McLeod has been collecting this type of craftwork for decades, and at the same time undertaking what one Australian writer recently referred to as “junkshop archaeology”. Initially, McLeod’s interest grew from a personal attachment to a number of similar objects: shoe bags, tea-trolley cloths and crocheted blankets made by the women in her family. These she inherited or more often rescued, in one case flying to Gisborne to secure a crocheted rug made by her grandmother – a trip that was possibly inspired by the loss of the family’s one handmade patchwork quilt, which ended its life as an oilcloth under a motorcycle. To these pieces, she has added works by other anonymous Kiwi women from her mother and grandmother’s generation, purchased from church shops.
In 2002, part of McLeod’s collection was exhibited at the ever-innovative Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, under the name “Thrift to Fantasy”. The exhibition was one of the best of its type, breaking new ground and attracting a wide audience. In the period since, McLeod has reshaped the exhibition into a book. Thrift to Fantasy: Home Textile Crafts of the 1930s-1950s, in its new Harper Collins form, goes further than the exhibition, providing an important and unexpectedly moving contribution to New Zealand design and craft history that will become a must-read for many New Zealand women.
Thrift to Fantasy is not only a seductively designed and illustrated book, but also one that uses crafts such as embroidery and knitting to provide a revealing insight into the personal lives of three generations of 20th-century Kiwi women. These are women who lived through two world wars and the Depression and who survived it all – in part, McLeod argues, because they had the world of craft into which to escape.
McLeod was a regular contributor to this magazine in the 1970s and was responsible for some of the best cartoons of the period. Thrift to Fantasy has little in common with McLeod’s satirical writing, except for the acute sense of social observation that flows through the best of her work. Faced with the problem of how to write about the works of women of whom she has no first-hand knowledge, McLeod has decided to write Thrift to Fantasy as part biography, part family history in which the women and their craft are the central characters. By doing this, McLeod was able to write the book as an antidote to Kiwi Gothic Land, where, as McLeod puts it, “men strode about with guns in the pig fern, taciturn, doing the Kiwi Male thing”. It’s a take on mainstream 20th-century New Zealand culture that is much overdue.
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