Book explores legacy of our female artisans

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Tell Ann Calhoun that her book, The Arts & Crafts Movement in New Zealand, 1870-1940, is a lovely thing, and she exclaims, "Yes. Isn't it?"

Well, and why shouldn't she? That she's been working on this elegant tome for six years should be cause enough for self-congratulation. But you get the impression listening to Calhoun's sweet, enthusiastic voice that if congratulations are due, they're all due to other people: Auckland University Press for being, she says, "so brave to take this up." To the artworks, if that is the right term (and we'll get to that), which feature on its glossy plates. But mostly to the women, the "new" women, as they were dubbed, if with a scoff and a sneer at the time, who embraced a movement and made it their own.

The subtitle of Calhoun's homage to those women is: Women make their mark.

Not that this is any hagiographical romp through the birds, butterflies and Southern Hemisphere-influenced botanical drawings which characterised a movement whose iconic master is the champion of design, William Morris. Calhoun, who trained as an art historian, has produced a serious and scholarly treatise on a part of our social and cultural history - it just happens to be a delightful one as well.

The Arts and Crafts movement was born in Britain in the mid-1800s, although it wasn't given a name until 1887. A design-based, genteel-looking (by our standards) uprising against the organisation of repressive and class-conscious Victorian society, the movement "sought to display the world in new ways" and "sought fundamental changes to the organisation of Victorian society," Calhoun writes. "The masses, 'the people,' must be rescued from the sub-human living and working conditions created by the Industrial Revolution." They would be artisans, rather than artists. Adherents to a philosophy which harked back to a view of medieval life where the living was "simple, uncluttered and country-based, with the economy centred on the household as the dominant production unit."

As good a definition of the movement as any, says Calhoun, comes from the mouth of the master himself. William Morris, that good socialist who knew good wallpaper from bad, had a vision of the ideal society: "Every man willing to work should be ensured: First, Honourable and fitting work; Second, A healthy and beautiful house; Third, Full leisure for rest of mind and body."

That "healthy and beautiful house" dictate, a response as valid now as it was then, arose from the Industrial Revolution's effect on the decline of the artisan class.

As Calhoun notes, "with the increased importance of technology went a loss of traditional design know-how." It wasn't just about not losing the ability to make those objects that were both beautiful and useful, it was about making those objects marketable.

Hence the South Kensington system (named after the school started in 1857 in London's South Kensington museum) of design and drawing was devised - by a panicked Government who discerned that a new, Government-sponsored artisan class was required. In a sort of "Your Country Needs You to Wield Your Pencils" drive, all children would be taught to draw "for the benefit of the nation." Even female children.

In New Zealand, says Calhoun, the recruitment drive began as early as 1877. Here, in a land "youthfully confident and willing to depart from British mores," more than the young responded: the colony's women took up the call to watercolours, swamping evening classes with enrolments at art schools across the country.

By the mid-1880s women made up almost half of the memberships of local art societies.

More than 100 years on, perhaps the most surprising aspect of their contribution to what Calhoun assesses as their part in the development of modernism and the national identity - they used local timbers; paua and greenstone; Maori motifs and native flora and fauna in their designs - is the prevalence of wood and metalworkers among them.

There was, of course, the patronising (to both sexes) view that paintings of flowers and botanical illustration were "an especially desirable skill" for the fairer sex.

The admirably named pursuit of "botanising" became both fashionable and worthy. Travelling the country, tracking the perfect specimen to set down on one's watercolour page became an acceptable part of the artisan woman's life - and, no doubt, a chance to get away from home and hearth no matter how delightfully decorated.

Belonging to the "movement," even if women didn't think of it in such terms, represented "freedom of labour. In some cases for earning [but certainly] for self-worth and for personal expression," says Calhoun.

But it is those women who created those objects hewn from wood or cast from metal which fascinate. At least for those of us who went to school in, say, the 1970s. There we were, stuck throwing lumpy pancakes at the ceiling for entertainment while the boys got to make wobbly wooden herons next door. At least they had something to give to Dad come Father's Day.

And we certainly never got told about the women in our history who were turning out exquisite repousse coffeepots or hand-carved hallway settles. Calhoun has discovered a house in Wellington in which a convert to the movement had carved the entire balustrade from the first floor up to the second, and fire surrounds, too.

It's a nice image of a housebound woman - except for, possibly, those emancipating night classes - out with her carving tool. With, again just possibly, the 1897 words of the Glasgow designer Jessie Newbury egging her on as she dug deep and creatively into those timbered edgings: "I believe that nothing is common or unclean. That the design and decoration of a pepper pot is as important ... as the conception of a cathedral."

William Morris himself could not possibly have disagreed.