Artist, activist and absurdist Judy Darragh has words with Joanna Wane.
Heather Galbraith was a teenage goth living on Auckland's white-bread North Shore when Judy Darragh swept into her sixth-form art class. It was the mid-1980s and Darragh, then known as the art world's "Queen of Kitsch", was a leopard-print revolutionary barely a decade older than the students she was teaching at Westlake Girls' High.
"It was a pivotal experience for me," says Galbraith, who went on to do a master's degree in curating at London's prestigious Goldsmiths art school. "Her curiosity, her sense of the absurd, her interest in popular culture ... thinking outside convention in a way that was really liberating. And she had the most amazing outfits. She was kind of a living work of art."
Almost four decades later, Darragh's use of materials often scavenged from op shops and discount stories still sits outside what the establishment might consider fine art, but her work is held in our national art collections and was celebrated in a major retrospective at Te Papa, titled "Judy Darragh: So … you made it?" A "maker" as much as an artist, she would have loved the pun.
Now, the mentor and her former star student are collaborating for the first time on a new exhibition, Competitive Plastics, which opens next Saturday at Auckland gallery Objectspace. Featuring a collection of Darragh's new and recent work, the show has been curated by Galbraith, who has a busy few days ahead overseeing its installation.
Given the scale and delicacy of some of the pieces, that will be a challenge in itself. Among the more dramatic assemblages is a Rorschach-inspired stack of stiletto "bedroom shoes", a floor-to-ceiling "show pony" with a bouffy chiffon mane, towers of $2 Shop plastic, rolls of yoga mats and a cloak made from dozens of sock packaging hooks.
Galbraith (who has a nice turn of phrase herself) has described the exhibition as "blisteringly low-tech".
"A lot of things are tied, glued or stacked or wrapped," she says. "Judy's work is extraordinary but it looks alarmingly simple. In actual fact, it's the result of literally decades of experimentation for her to make it look that easy."
Communicating complex ideas through visual metaphors and wordplay, the show is a jubilant riot of colour that lures people in to chew on some juicy subject matter. Darragh's previous exhibitions have tackled everything from pornography and sexual politics to free-market reforms and climate change.
Competitive Plastics comes from the name of a now-defunct industrial manufacturer she passed by on her way to a gallery in Christchurch — some of her best ideas have been inspired by looking out a car or bus window.
Issues around rampant materialism and excessive consumption are some of the more obvious readings. But she also sees the demonisation of plastic as a class issue, "because it's cheap and affordable if you can't go to that swishy shop on Ponsonby Rd and buy a fancy pot scrubber".
A construction of plastic bric-a brac, titled Mono, is a nod to the mass-produced Monobloc chair, which was briefly banned from public spaces in the Swiss city of Basel to preserve the beauty of the cityscape but is a staple piece of affordable furniture in the Third World.
You can interpret Darragh's art however you want, of course, but nothing she makes is without deliberate and considered intent. A stand of flaming LED lights, modelled on signage outside a kebab shop, are mirrored by the "flame" of street protests in photo montages of the Los Angeles riots and Arab Spring pro-democracy demonstrations. Look closer and some of the images aren't real but re-enactments staged for a movie scene.
The central thread of the exhibition references French philosopher Catherine Malabou's concept of "the fold". The first fold is called grace, explains Darragh, a kind of mindful creativity that comes when you repeat the same action over and over again (learning to play the piano, for example, or weaving a continuous pattern). The second fold is disease.
"That's when you have addictions — smoking, alcohol, drugs — and lose that awareness of what you're doing," says Darragh, whose triptych "Smoke" is made from hundreds of empty cigarette packets. "I didn't want to go into the whole French theory; that's a real turn-off. But I'm interested in habit forming, and a lot of how I make is very analogue and very much repetitive in that way."
She's also intrigued by the parallels between plastic as a material and the science of neuroplasticity. A photographic work, called Stroke, is her analogue version of an image her son Buster showed her that was doing the rounds on the internet, where artificial intelligence had been used to create a digital rendering of the visual disturbances described by stroke survivors.
"I liked this idea that the brain is fluid, the way plastic is fluid when it's being made before it becomes rigid. And then we also talk about people becoming rigid in their thinking," she says. "There's all this shared language in how we speak about our world that relates to the body: a city has arteries, the parks are its lungs. An artist has a body of work. Words are really important in how we describe what we see – the word 'idea' comes from 'to see in the mind's eye'. We see and then we talk."
Searching for the double meaning in some of her more cryptic creations is half the fun. Twists of black hat wire spidering down the wall might represent the body's nervous system but also Darragh's own "nervy" mood in such an unsettling, uncertain times. "Globally, we don't know what we're going into. It's still precarity. I couldn't make anything over that first lockdown. I was anxious and on edge, and I think there's a sort of nervousness in the work."
When the exhibition is dismantled, many of its parts will once again become more than the whole. "All of this will go back to op shops after the show," she says, gesturing towards a cluster of half-packed artworks being prepared for transportation to the gallery. She'll have to spread it around, though, or staff might lock the doors when they see her coming.
Storage shelves at the back of her studio are already overflowing with miscellaneous objects and old work, including "The Joy of Stacks" from 2007, a series made from op-shop ceramics and glassware, stuck together with Gorilla Glue that's dried to create rivulets dripping down the sides like melted toffee.
"I made hundreds of these; some of those ceramics would probably be quite valuable now," she says, but the pieces are fragile and in various states of disrepair. "A lot of my work is problematic because it's materially not archival. Our galleries are full of objects that will be around forever. Is that a good thing? I don't know."
Darragh answers the door wearing a black, tiger-print T-shirt with teeth that glow in the dark. Her whole outfit, from head to toe, is second-hand. "Do you want to hold an Oscar?" she says, heading into the kitchen to make a cup of ginger and kawakawa tea.
It's surprisingly heavy. Her partner, Grant Major, won an Academy Award for production design on The Lord of the Rings and has spent the past eight months working in Australia on a project for Netflix. Darragh has used the time apart as an artist's residency of sorts, focusing 24/7 on the Objectspace exhibition and another to follow at Auckland's Two Rooms gallery in November.
She turns 63 this year and jokes she can't wait to qualify for the pension. For many artists, she says, it's the first regular income they've had. During lockdown, she co-founded an advocacy group Arts Makers Aotearoa, which supports artists being paid a living wage. Last year, she earned about $12,000.
"I don't make a living out of my work, that's for sure. But I don't do myself any favours; I'm hopeless at pricing and I give work away," she says. "I've always taught to make my living and that's given me the freedom to make silly things out of plastic that fall apart. And I like undermining the tradition of how the art world operates in that financial way."
The group is campaigning for artists to be represented on advisory boards and believes royalties should be paid when their work is on-sold. "That would be great because art is going off at the moment. We're one of the few countries that doesn't have royalties but dealers don't want it. We've tried."
She's also heartbroken that art is no longer a core focus in the school curriculum. "It should be STEAM [science, technology, engineering, arts and maths] not STEM."
Darragh, too, had a sixth-form art teacher who was her "spark", the noted photographer Rhondda Bosworth. She'd already begun a lifetime of collecting by then, snapping up a Susie Cooper teapot at a church fair.
The daughter of a working-class family in Christchurch — her dad was a freezing worker and her mother worked in a clothing factory — she studied graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic before moving to Auckland to train as a secondary-school teacher. It was transformational.
"Coming to the [then] Pacific suburb of Ponsonby and seeing shops full of lei on Karangahape Rd was such a rich experience, especially compared to Christchurch, which was a very flat white. It was a real eye-opener with all that joyous colour and plastic everywhere," she says.
"I'd gone through polytech with that Bauhaus ethos of art where more is less and the priority of design is function. I think you leave an institution like that and hit out of the box. I went, 'Nah, I'm going to make that plastic bowl functionless. I'm going to decorate the bejesus out of something!'"
Her signature kitsch aesthetic in the 80s, using cheap materials such as Christmas lights and plastic flowers in work she sold at the Cook St markets, was a poke in the eye to the establishment. Her art — and her reputation — has evolved since then, but she still views the snobbery around it as a class issue.
A self-described feminist artist, she's recently wrapped the fourth (and final) edition of Femisphere, a magazine dedicated to female artists in New Zealand that was funded by a suffrage grant from Creative New Zealand. She lost her full-time teaching role when she became pregnant at the age of 40, and her art dealer at the time wrote her off. Back then, motherhood and creativity were considered incompatible.
Today, Darragh is still running ideas she had in residencies four years ago. On her work bench is a collection of mannequin arms and an oversized set of teeth, used as a dental training model. Chances are they'll make an appearance in her next show.
"I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't make art," she says. "I'd go nuts. Sylvia Ashton-Warner used to talk about feeding the beast. You have to feed it, or it consumes you."
Galbraith thinks Darragh's work is extraordinary and hasn't received the recognition and accolades it deserves. "There's no one else in New Zealand making work like this or for as long as she has, with such cohesive inquiry."
As curator, Galbraith will be there for the show's opening night. "I'll be the one dressed peculiarly with white hair and pink glasses." Should be easy to spot then? "I don't know," she says, with a laugh. "It's not just Judy and me, there are a few wacky older female dressers."
I can't wait to see what they wear.
Competitive Plastics will be on show at Objectspace in Grey Lynn from June 19 to September 5 (objectspace.org.nz). Darragh will also be working with artists Ani O'Neill and Layla Rudneva-Mackay on a series of collaborative workshops, in parallel with Hīnātore: A Love Story, an exhibition of fabric artist Ron Te Kāwa's whakapapa quilts that will incorporate a sewing studio in the gallery.
