KEY POINTS:
When artist Lonnie Hutchinson was a consistently stroppy school kid, she lasted one week in the sixth form at her Auckland school, refusing to wear the uniform but resplendent in a marijuana-motif T-shirt she'd bought while on holiday in Honolulu. There was no backing down, no going on, and the dean gave her a challenge, saying she'd never get a job looking like that.
"The first place I knocked on the door, I got a job," she recalls. Her new trade was as a pattern-cutter for Earlybird Fashions, a fitting start for a girl who had always loved to make things, partly inspired by her father's work as a panel beater.
"Bog hadn't been invented then so they used to melt down lead and spread it over the panels. Back at home, Dad would melt down lead and we'd make holes in the ground and he would pour lead into those holes to make sinkers for fishing. That was all fascinating to me. In those days I would hammer metal and wood to make things and I drew a lot."
Banging things around has grown into a more sophisticated practice as Hutchinson, now 44, has trained, developed a varied body of work and won respect and acclaim at home and internationally. Her work is held by major public institutions in New Zealand.
Hutchinson makes sculpture, intricate cut-outs, drawings, photographic and video works, using materials as varied as heavy builders' paper, steel and perspex. She makes templates and hand-cuts all her paper works for harder materials like acrylic and steel. The template is made of paper, then scanned for a graphic designer who puts them into an illustrator programme. She works with the designer to finesse the look she wants, then passes the design on to a laser cutter she has worked with for four years.
Hutchinson took a few detours before getting started on the art as a career. After two years at Earlybird, she married, had a child and went sharemilking in the central North Island. The marriage broke up not long after moving back to Auckland, where her parents live.
As a solo mother with a rugby-mad son (now 25), she started part-time work at a screen-printers and eventually worked full-time for a print company. She won a design competition, and got a note from tutors at Unitec asking her to come and see them. Hutchinson ended up doing a four-year Bachelor of Design degree, majoring in 3D design and went on to do a one-year teaching diploma at the Christchurch College of Education.
She became a "long-term reliever" in St Peters College art department in Auckland, a job she loved, but then she won the 2000 Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies residency at the University of Canterbury, the first time a woman had been appointed to that position. It was a three-month residency that made her realise combining full-time teaching and an art career would not work for her.
"So, after the residency, I based myself in Lyttelton to keep my overheads down. I was there for about three and a half years and cheffed Friday and Saturday nights at the Volcano Cafe down the road. The Lyttelton community supports the many artists that live there. It's Bill Hammond country - he and others supported my fledgling practice and I have many great friends there. I suppose if I was going to settle somewhere it would be back there."
A nomad who loves roaming, Hutchinson's art has opened the doorways to group exhibitions in public galleries around the country as well as contributions to biennials in Brisbane, Adelaide, Banff, Canada (where she enjoyed the 1st International Indigenous Art residency in 2003), Noumea, Sao Paulo and Chile. She sports an elaborate Chile tattoo on her right bicep.
She has work in the touring Dateline show of New Zealand artists - including Shane Cotton, Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Pardington - which opened in Berlin last year and is now showing in Kiel, Germany.
She is making new pieces for the Biennial in Christchurch later this year - "a huge work opening on Anzac Day" - as well as a show at Pataka Museum in Lower Hutt, curated by Helen Kedgley.
But she is conscious that with travelling around so much, she doesn't see as much of her Mt Roskill family - nine nieces, one nephew and a grand niece - as she would like. So she decided to make a film featuring two young nieces - Sinalei and Losana Tuiletufuga - in conversation with her mother, their grandmother, Samoan-born Susana Luafutu Hutchinson. The result is called Fish Eyes, which opened at MIC last Friday.
"There are all these younger ones coming through in the family and we have had a few funerals over the past couple of years of the older ones," she says. "I remember hearing the stories when I was growing up, the Samoan stuff, and I felt I had to start documenting the history of the family, so that is what I've been doing.
"This show is just a little slice from a couple of hours of footage of my mother having conversations with two of her grand-daughters [aged nine and 10 at the time]. I set up three cameras in the lounge, one camera each, for one session, and told them to talk to Nana the way you normally do. Before you knew it, they forgot their inhibitions."
With the wide screen at MIC split into three, the chatter ranges over subjects including where do carrots come from, eating fish heads and fish eyes, spiders, stars, and what they want to be when they grow up (the daughter of Donald Trump, said one). It's about family, dreams, comfort and fun, and is quite entrancing.
A smaller version has already screened in Sydney and at Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch, where a 2-year-old visiting with his parents refused to leave, laughing away to himself. The images are made more poignant because Hutchinson's father, who had taken ill and been rushed to hospital, arrived back home the day they started filming.
Leilani Kake's Ariki and Preserve, Renew, Invent [Light Bytes] by Lesley Kaiser are also screening at MIC until March 8.
* Fish Eyes is at the MIC (Media & Interdisciplinary Arts Centre), 321 K Rd, to March 8
