KEY POINTS:
Sandra Bushby opens a box of embroidery. There is her mother's work, tightly stitched, immaculately finished front and back; pieces by her grandmother, looser, freer, on ageing linen; and the scarf her grandfather stitched in Cairo in 1916, bright threads on black silk drawing out words, flags and an animated lion.
Bushby's own embroidery is on the walls at the Anna Miles Gallery - an ancient craft technique pressed into the service of art.
She started as a painter, after training at Canterbury University's Ilam Art School, then taught secondary school for 12 years. She abandoned that to make art full time, or as full time as the mother of a young child can manage.
"I was wanting to make art and looking for fresh ways, mediums, materials," she says.
Her choice of medium took some explaining. "I was taking it seriously in my home and studio. It was not until I took it out into the art world I realised it wasn't taken seriously."
It's not that artists have not taken a needle and thread to their works.
Ronnie van Hout turned "band members wanted" notices from music stores into stitched works, and Tracey Emin has needled the names of past lovers and other ephemera in her life into sheets, blankets and canvases.
But Bushby is setting aside the irony and celebrating the skill.
"I am very into the tradition but I can't just be into that. It's nice to have art intents." She is drawn more to artists like Rosemary Trockel, Annette Messager and Elaine Reichek, who have used more finely-rendered stitching to make conceptual statements.
"It's very much about the making. I guess I wanted to make and I couldn't see a lot of making in the art world, so I was looking at the craft."
That took her to Fingers, where she also shows small jewel-like pieces - and some not so small.
Looking at the works in her new show, My Zealotry, the making aspect stands out. While many contemporary New Zealand artists are jobbing out the manual labour in their works, Bushby stitches away, getting fractionally more assured with each stitch, learning from the process.
The round pieces have echoes of traditional Suzanne embroidery from Uzbekistan, while also incorporating the Bauhaus colour theories of Josef Albers. "His colour patterns were very much about push and pull of dark and light colours, making dark colours advance and light colours recede," Bushby says.
"I studied them at art school and was always struck by them. The other reason for looking at Albers is to bring seriousness to the stitching."
The zealotry of the show's title refers to the compulsive perfectionism which is a feature of embroidery.
"Because of the nature of this, because you sit down, it takes a lot of time, you have to be zealous about it to do it. The time thing really interests me. Time as a dimension of space and a distance to lose yourself in."
The embroidery frame is picked up and put down between other tasks. "Embroidery becomes part of your life. I plan it out so a lot of the stitching can be done when I'm talking to a child, stirring a pot."
She is also interested in the psychology of the stitch, but she is wary of the feminist overtones of appropriating women's crafts into art.
"I am not interested in the women's bind, the way it's tied up in 1970s feminist work - but I wouldn't be making these works had feminism not existed. But it's not overt, not explicit."
Exhibition
What: My Zealotry, by Sandra Bushby
Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, 4J Canterbury Arcade, to Nov 24
