Yvonne Todd’s work has been described as “suburban gothic”, which she agrees fits and could easily describe her latest project: bridal wear.
The bride in the photograph stands in a suburban garden, framed by a pear tree. Her wedding bouquet is a long stem with daisies. She wears a straw boater and the maddest pants you have ever seen in your life. Which may be why she looks less than ecstatic at having just married the man of her dreams. The title of her wedding portrait is Jemima and she currently resides at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt alongside 11 other photographs in Auckland artist Yvonne Todd’s Brides exhibition.
To me, they look like slightly creepy paper dolls. Like cut-outs of brides. You wouldn’t like to play with them, though. You’d be afraid they might come to life in the night and come after you with the scissors you used to cut them out. They also look, by turns, defiant, or sulky, or already disillusioned. Allegra, in her unflattering frumpy apricot frock with ragged lace trim, just looks scarily angry. She might be having regrets.
Why brides? “I was thinking about this piece of jewellery by a contemporary artist called Ruth Baird in the Dowse’s collection, and it’s called Neck Corset with Pearls,” says Todd. “It’s like a collar. It’s made out of a fine silver mesh. And that made me start thinking about the formality of bridal wear and tradition. But then, I also wanted to explore meandering tropes and ideas around rites and rituals and staged photography.”
She thinks this “harks back to when I was a child. And what I really liked doing was setting up these strange little tableau of my motley collection of dolls and ornaments.”
Making these tableau “also helped me process or distil just the weird. You know how you have interactions with people and they leave you kind of questioning … like you’re left wondering. Because I overthink everything, it was my way of processing life.”
Preconceived ideas
What a funny little girl she must have been. “I know. I was definitely quite odd. This is what I’m still doing. I always say I think people should do what they enjoyed doing as children. It’s what they should seek out to do professionally as adults if they can.”
This is a fantastic idea. I will, I say, therefore become a professional paper doll player. One of us is in her early 50s; one of us in her early 60s. And here we are now happily having a conversation about the paper doll collections of our respective childhoods. In our imaginations, we are sitting, almost together, making our own dolls and designing their outfits. She is such fun. She embraces the idea of play.
People have preconceived ideas about her. As well they might, because there is this: when Todd was about 8, she took up pretending to have various ailments. She pretended she couldn’t see because she really wanted to wear prescription glasses. “It was the accoutrements of illness that I really wanted.” She tried to break her leg by jumping out of a tree. She wanted crutches and a plaster cast. She made fake vomit and gave herself black eyes using typewriter ribbons. I say that I’m stumped. I can’t think what question could possibly be formulated to ask about this.
“It was just attention-seeking behaviour. It’s quite sad, really.” It is, but there is also this: “I think I just needed an outlet for my creativity. That’s just how it came out. I was in a drama group and that probably feeds that behaviour. So, it was very much being aware of your audience.”
Really, she was just practising to be an artist. In the 2005 work Fractoid, a faceless woman in a blonde wig and pristine pink dress is on crutches. Todd sees all her portraits as self-portraits.
She has said that when people meet her, they say, with disappointment, “But you’re so normal.”
She is. But also, by her own admission, odd. “I think I’m both. I think it’s fine to co-exist.” She doesn’t know what people expect when they meet her.
Her art is gloomy, gothic and slightly askew. In other words, a bit weird, and therefore she must also be a bit weird would be my best guess about what people think. Her art is cryptic, therefore she must also be unknowable. She isn’t. She wants her work to make people uncomfortable, but she doesn’t make people uncomfortable. She is friendly.
The point of the discomfort that the work provokes is deliberate, “because there needs to be some sort of tension. I really like playing into expectations around photography. My photographs have a kind of convincingly mainstream look to them.”
Todd thinks her brides are “slightly spooky. They’re hard to place in terms of their intent and who they are and what they’re about. It’s like they are waiting for their moment – or has the moment passed?”
I say I think their moment has passed. That these are moments captured after the wedding ceremony and the kissing of the bride and the congratulations from the beaming guests. I think the brides are thinking: now what? “And there’s a slightly disappointed feel or not impressed or something.”
She is also funny. Her art is also funny.
I am talking to Todd on the phone, but she doesn’t have my full attention. Those mad pants do. I am looking at Jemima on my screen and have become fixated on those hairy trousers. They are white mohair pants, hand-knitted in Bulgaria by a woman called Super Tanya. I ask: “What’s going on with those pants?” Because they truly are the most insane pants in the history of pants. They too are also funny.
The inspiration for the pants was the shaggy-legged, cloven-hoofed faun Mr Tumnus, in CS Lewis’s Narnia books. “They’re quite nutty.” Quite nutty! They’re completely nutty. “I’ve still got them. I might wear them, but they’re not very flattering. They add a lot of bulk.”
The model looks disappointed. As you would be if you had to wear those pants, in a garden, in an Auckland summer. There were mosquitoes. I also thought she might be looking across the garden at the man she has just married and thinking: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Yeah, maybe. Mr Tumnus.” What does she think their children will be like? “Well, I think they’ll have furry legs and maybe cloven hooves.”
Peripheral bogan
Todd grew up in Auckland’s Takapuna with her accountant parents and an older brother who she thinks does something in the corporate world, but she’s not sure what. Her mother still sometimes runs up costumes on her Bernina for Todd’s portraits. Todd used to be a bogan – “or a peripheral bogan”. She still likes bogan music: Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Megadeth. But she also likes Céline Dion. She is fond of a good juxtaposition.
She now lives one suburb away in Northcote with her husband, Colin, and their sons, an 8-year-old and 5-year-old twins. Her husband is the full-time kiddie wrangler. She has a full-time job as an art teacher at a North Shore college she’d prefer not to name. She is doing her master of fine arts degree. She makes her art. She might be an over-achiever. “I am. But I spent a lot of time not being that. And now I am, it’s only because I felt I had to make up for lost time.”
She said, “I’m quite extreme and the way I approach things, it’s all very all or nothing. People think I’m laid-back, but I’m not.” Now that made me laugh. She is whatever is the very opposite of laid-back.
She likes to live an “anonymous” life. But she’s the best artist of her generation in New Zealand, according to the art critic Anthony Byrd. “He said that 20 years ago.” In 2002, at 28, she won the inaugural Walters Prize, the country’s largest and most prestigious contemporary art award. And in 2019, she received an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award – given to artists whose work has had an impact on New Zealand. She’s famous. She laughed at that and said, “I don’t know if I’m famous. I’m quite sort of niche renown.”
She has said she finds her work “irritating”. By irritating she means she doesn’t always love what she makes, and if she looks at it, she can see “weaknesses”.
“I often look at my work from the perspective of others and I can dismiss it at times as being slightly lightweight, or it’s too polished, or it’s not kind of gritty enough.” Who are these other people? “Imaginary critics in my mind!”
She doesn’t have any of her own work hanging on the walls at home. She is “quite monastic. And I don’t really like a lot of stuff, because it channels your thoughts. You know, the way your thoughts are directed when you look at stuff.”
In her ideal world, her home environment would be sparse and “sort of Scandinavian”. She might have to wait until the kids move out. “Yeah, I think so. I’m appalled at how much stuff they accumulate.”
She leads, by choice, a “suburban existence”. She likes boring things. “I quite like having a really low-key existence. Just having lots of facts of ordinariness in my life. That’s something I get a lot of contentment from. Everyday drudgery. It seems to be helpful for my art. At the moment, I’m really interested in the intersecting of the everyday, the mundane moments. The juxtaposition between strangeness and things that are quite ordinary.”
She’s a vegan. She once said, “Vegetarians are lightweights.” Oh, she’s always saying things like that, she says. “I mean, it’s slightly judgmental. But I do say the wrong things. I can’t help myself.”
When she commits to a thing, she really commits to a thing. She has exactly the same thing to eat every day: “a portion of corn chips with Mexican beans and vegan coconut yoghurt. And then some salad greens.” Then she has, precisely, four black olives. Nothing weird about that. What would happen, if, say, she was served only three black olives? “I think I’d be fine with that.”
She says that for 26 years she used to drink a lot, but now she doesn’t drink at all. Just cutting back would, presumably, be lightweight. She says, redundantly: “I’m quite extreme.”
Just a bit. Here she is perfecting a still-life performance, which she calls an Act of Retribution by Proxy. She spotted her first boyfriend, from when she was 16, at her local supermarket. “And here’s this skeletal, emaciated figure with long grey hair.” He was buying booze, early in the morning. They had a toxic relationship.
She got her husband to dress up in a long grey wig, woodgrain-printed rompers and roller skates. Of course, she turned her act of retribution into a photo: its title is Ice Blue. “I don’t know, it was like an exercise in trying to confront the past in a way that I could channel some rage.” Blimey.
What did her husband think? “He was fine. I think when I mentioned the wood-grained rompers and the roller skates, his hackles went up a bit. But everyone’s expected to chip in.”
You do have to ask: what did she wear on her wedding day? A perhaps surprisingly traditional white frock. “Because, I dunno, I didn’t really want to make a statement of any sort.”
There is a photo of her standing in her frock by the side of a swimming pool, in front of a pink concrete wall with cracks in it. There is messy pool equipment and a pool house in the frame. She didn’t want floaty pictures in a flower garden. She wanted – and this comes as no surprise – to introduce the mundane into her wedding photos. She looks beautiful and her frock is gorgeous.
She is wearing a little veil, but it looks like the sort of veil you might pin on a doll. I think it might be one of her in-jokes. She has a slightly apprehensive look – like the brides in her Dowse exhibition.
“I was hamming it up.” She is very serious. She likes to ham it up. In other words, she is oddly normal. It’s fine to co-exist.
Yvonne Todd’s Brides exhibition is on at the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, until October 13.