Nelson-based artist Georgia Barber tells Russell Brown how a rock ‘n’ roll background
led her to worldwide success — via the humble tea towel.
It was seven years ago, at Nelson Market, that Georgia Barber discovered that the way to get men to buy homewares was through their record collections.
Barber had been selling printed T-shirts and tea towels at the market and doing well enough. And then came Bob Marley and Johnny Rotten. Tea towels hitherto bought almost exclusively by women were suddenly snapped up by men when they came emblazoned with images of the two musical icons and the respective puntastic slogans: "No Woman No Dry" and "Never Mind the Dishes".
Her market doubled, although there is no data on whether any more dishes were done. Since then there have been Patti Smith ("Jesus Dried for Somebody's Sins But Not Mine"), The Cure ("Boys Don't Dry"), a dart into other household chores with a rock legend called Bruce Springclean, and more.
The towels have become cult items around the country and abroad — Patti Smith herself has one — without most people knowing exactly where they come from.
The truth is, they're made by a 46-year-old woman in Nelson, who does everything herself, from original designs to pre-print ironing, printing, heat-setting, packaging, invoicing and dispatch.
Barber's only art education is a "special art" class in Perth, before she left school aged 15. But she has plenty of rock 'n' roll to call on. Her late father was one of two fans recorded by the Evening Post as having climbed a fire escape on Wellington's St George hotel in a successful bid to meet the Beatles in 1964. He briefly managed Dinah Lee and wound up in London repairing rock stars' amplifiers. Her own love of music was kindled by rummaging through her mother's records at the age of 6. And at 17, she left her job at Smith & Caughey's, flew to London and landed in the thick of it.
While her peers were studying for UE, Barber was running the cafe serving a cluster of recording and rehearsal studios in Clink St, near London Bridge. At Prime Time rehearsal studios, she made friends with her compatriots The Chills. Next door was Beat Farm, where EMF's Unbelievable was made. Downstairs was RiP, the rawest of London's early acid house clubs.
"That was a big thing," she recalls. "The very early days of acid house. I didn't go because was too scared!"
She lived with musician and manager Ian Penman and became friends with Andy Engell, who designed the sleeve of Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction.
"So we'd always get limos and freebies and VIP seats at the Stones and so on. Everything was just so free!"
These days, she works from a small studio at Nelson's Founders Park, accompanied at all times by her SPCA rescue dog, Max. Although she still personally dispatches tea towels as far as Four Candles, the boutique run by Ronnie Corbett's daughter Sophie in Brighton, UK, she also makes one-off screen-printed artworks.
"I do love selling art, but I don't always have time for it because I spend so much time printing tea towels," she says. "But they're also a really cheap canvas to try things with. They're perfect — cheap and white and pure."
Some customers, she has discovered, treat the tea towels themselves as art: "So many of them end up on walls. It's ridiculous."
Georgia Barber's tea towels.
While she's keen for people to use the tea towels for their stated purpose — not least because it means they'll eventually have to come back and buy more — she admits to being flattered that people hang and even frame them.
And she's delighted that Patti Smith has hers.
"My friend was in Edinburgh, reviewing at the fringe festival. She managed to get backstage and handed it to Patti, who was immediately ushered into her car by the bouncer — but was seen to unfurl it and smile. That's all we know. And I didn't hear from her lawyers."
A regular customer also almost got "Bruce Springclean" to The Boss.
"He took one to the concert in Christchurch and he was just metres from the stage, but there were just too many bouncers to get it to him. But Bruce came over and saw it and grabbed Steve Vai and they were both pointing to it and laughing."
Although most of Barber's images are based on iconic photographs, they're often transformed in small ways (Smith, for example, has some of Keith Richards' hair and Bruce Springclean's vacuum cleaner is the artist's own). She has also begun to return to what she calls her "repeat: images", geometric patterns sketched by hand, tidied up on a computer, then linocut by hand and tessellated for printing.
Several of her latest crop of designs, including a Prince one ("I Would Dry For You") are created with the tessellated patterns, a direction she wants to pursue after she relocates to Seattle next year.
Oh yes, there's a rock 'n' roll story there too.
Barber is moving to there to marry and live with Tim Cook, a passionate Flying Nun fan she met this year on a tiny online indie music forum ("we totally bonded over music").
The first song he messaged to her was the Chills' deeply soppy Wet Blanket and their first date was at this year's Chills show at Auckland's Kings Arms.
So the indie love story means Christmas is the last opportunity to buy the local product for that special music fan in the house?
Barber's tea towels (and a Frida Kahlo shopping bag) are available from her website at plumjamdesigns.co.nz or from plumjam.felt.co.nz. They're stocked in Auckland at The Garden Party in Ponsonby and Real Groovy Records. Her "repeat" designs are often tested out on the Plum Jam Designs' Instagram account.
