{"id":1631,"date":"2019-04-01T22:19:55","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T22:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/?p=1631"},"modified":"2019-04-02T01:46:11","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T01:46:11","slug":"louise-menzies-in-an-orange-my-mother-was-eating-16-february-30-march-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/louise-menzies-in-an-orange-my-mother-was-eating-16-february-30-march-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Louise Menzies: In an orange my mother was eating (16 February – 30 March 2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post researched and written by Nick Austin, a General Assistant at the Hocken. He was the 2012 Frances Hodgkins Fellow and presented the exhibition The Liquid Dossier\u00a0<\/em>(16 February \u2013 13 April 2013) at the Hocken Gallery.<\/p>\n

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Sitting and reading. These verbs take on a vocational significance at the\u00a0Hocken; users of our material are called\u00a0\u2018readers\u2019, after all. Louise Menzies’ exhibition at the Hocken gallery, called\u00a0In an orange my mother was eating<\/em>\u00a0turned aspects of her research activity, as the 2018\u00a0Frances Hodgkins Fellow<\/a>,\u00a0into a \u2018family\u2019 of related artworks. Some of these\u00a0works are paper-based, and most have text in them. Every one, though, is a kind of ‘material meditation’\u00a0<\/em>variously on artists and\u00a0their legacies –\u00a0and other items of ephemera –\u00a0some of which she encountered over the twelve months she lived in Dunedin and read at the Hocken.<\/p>\n

In the main gallery, a sky-blue shelf ran the full length of the longest wall.\u00a0On its ledge,\u00a0 24 individual sheets of paper, hand-made by Menzies. Adhered to each of these sheets is a risographed facsimile of one of two intimately related texts. One of these\u00a0is a colouring-in book called\u00a0The Lone Goose\u00a0<\/a><\/em>by the artist Joanna Margaret Paul (1945 \u2013 2003). Published in 1979 by Dunedin-based McIndoe Press, it is an elliptical sort of story about the imagined friends of a goose waddling around our city\u2019s Southern Cemetery.\u00a0Paul complements her text with suitably \u2013 and wonderfully – provisional line drawings.<\/p>\n

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Louise Menzies, The Lone Goose (detail) 2019 Inkjet and risograph prints set in handmade paper Book pages: The Lone Goose by Joanna Margaret Paul, (Dunedin: McIndoe, 1979). With thanks to the Joanna Margaret Paul estate; Correspondence relating to The Lone Goose: MS-3187\/058, Hocken Collections \u2013 Uare Taoka o H\u0101kena, University of Otago.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Louise Menzies, The Lone Goose (installation view) 2019, Inkjet and risograph prints set in handmade paper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While researching Hocken\u2019s holdings of Paul material (we have quite a lot[i]<\/a>), Menzies mistakenly requested a manuscript from our archives stack. Serendipitously, it contained correspondence between various players\u00a0on the subject of\u00a0The Lone Goose<\/em>\u2019s distribution. This cache of letters is\u00a0the second\u00a0text\u00a0in Menzies\u2019 work. On one hand, representatives from McIndoe\u2019s distributors, Reed, just do not \u2018get’ Paul’s book: \u201cI fear the reps are going to be laughed out of the shops if they try and sell it.\u201d But in response, Brian Turner (yes, the poet) in his capacity as Paul\u2019s editor, is clearly peeved: \u201c\u2026 I guess we [at McIndoe] do not move in the real world, as your reps do, and can hide our embarrassment at being \u2018arty\u2019.\u201d While the letters present a bleakly familiar story of an artwork\u2019s failure to lift-off in the marketplace (that the book is not exactly\u00a0an artwork, does not\u00a0really matter here), Menzies\u2019 work is not depressing\u00a0\u2013 it represents a significant new generation<\/a> of Paul admirers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Louise Menzies, The Lone Goose (detail) 2019 Inkjet and risograph prints set in handmade paper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is easy to sense Paul\u2019s importance to Menzies. (The title of the exhibition is a line from a Paul poem.)\u00a0Both artists use language as\u00a0a material to\u00a0give\u00a0form to thought. The way Paul\u2019s work \u2013 her drawing, painting, film-making, writing \u2013 absorbs and reflects the places, people, things around her, is of high interest to Menzies. Paul was a Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1983 so there is a kind of genealogical thread that connects them, too.<\/p>\n

Frances Hodgkins. Given the reflexivity of this exhibition, it was sort of a no-brainer for Menzies to use Hodgkins (1869 \u2013 1947) as a subject. It is surprising, though, how she did it. In one of the gallery\u2019s side rooms sat three chairs: one a type you would see in halls and meeting rooms, dating from possibly the 1980s; one, a three-legged stool from about the 1960s; the other a contemporary type of adjustable office chair, with the brand name\u00a0Studio\u00a0<\/em>on the rear of its back. This furniture shares the same provenance \u2013 all three were relocated\u00a0from the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship studio, which is just across the road from the Hocken – and Menzies re-upholstered them in identical fabric.<\/p>\n

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Louise Menzies, Untitled (textile design no. II), 1925 (installation view) 2018 Digital print on textile<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Louise Menzies, Untitled (textile design no. II), 1925 (detail) 2018 Digital print on textile<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 1920s, Hodgkins was actively considering her return to NZ when, after years of struggle,\u00a0she was offered a financial reprieve: a job in Manchester as a textile designer. While there are few extant examples of actual Hodgkins textiles (a silk handkerchief<\/a> is held at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery), several of her gouache sketches are held at\u00a0Te Papa. Menzies has printed the chairs\u2019 fabric with one of these<\/a> (digitally adapted) designs. Her work is named after its source,\u00a0Untitled (textile design no. II), <\/em>1925.\u00a0While the chairs serve as a memorial to the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship\u2019s titular artist, they’re\u00a0also a reminder of the stationary fact that every artist needs to make a buck somehow.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

One thing that is different for an artist\u2019s viability in the 21st<\/sup>Century is the sheer number of residencies available to them. While the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago remains one of the most generous offered in NZ (12 months on a Lecturer\u2019s salary; free studio), this country\u2019s artists frequently travel the world to participate in residency programs.\u00a0In 2014, Menzies was invited to do a residency and exhibition at the\u00a0University of Connecticut Art Gallery<\/a>. During her six-week visit, she worked with the Alternative Press Collection (one of the largest collections of its type in the USA) within the\u00a0Thomas J. Dodd\u2019s Research Center<\/a>. Over a much longer period, a resultant publication gestated. In fact, Menzies used the first part of her Hodgkins Fellowship to complete it.<\/p>\n

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Image: (publication cover) design by Narrow Gauge, images courtesy of Allan Smith, George Watson, Alternative Press Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Time to think like a mountain<\/a><\/em>, the finished book, was a segue into a publication-project that marked Menzies\u2019 time as the Hodgkins Fellow. Coinciding with her Hocken exhibition and the end of her residency, Menzies and designer Matthew Galloway produced a\u00a0calendar<\/a> with source material from the Hocken\u2019s Ephemera Collection. Each of Menzies\u2019 calendar\u2019s pages features an image of a calendar page from a past year whose dates fell on the same days as the present month\u2019s. In yet another reflexive nod, Menzies\u2019 calendar runs from February 2019 to January 2020 (the chronology of months over which the Fellowship takes place)\u2026 but the elegance of the idea is better explained with images:<\/p>\n

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Louise Menzies 2019 (detail) 2018 12-page calendar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Louise Menzies 2019 (detail) 2018 12-page calendar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Louise Menzies 2019 (detail) 2018 12-page calendar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is fascinating how\u00a0Menzies rematerialised different sources from the Hocken Collections as art; how she used her Fellowship as a subject; how she shows that time is not linear.<\/p>\n

A video work that\u00a0shares its title with the exhibition’s the video has many, intriguingly related, parts: an image of Paul\u2019s son, Pascal, sitting for the camera; a soundtrack of the Ornette Colman song, The Empty Foxhole<\/em>, featuring his then-10-year old son on drums; intertitles that contain a transcript of the complete Paul poem from which the exhibition took its name; an anecdote involving Menzies\u2019 daughter\u2026<\/p>\n

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Louise Menzies In an orange my mother was eating (installation view) 2019 Digital video, 3 min 21 sec<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All photography unless otherwise credited: Iain Frengley<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> We have nearly five hundred Paul items, including her paintings, drawings and sketchbooks.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Or, as another\u00a0expatriate<\/a>\u00a0NZ artist has put it,\u00a0\u201cThe artist has to live like everybody else.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post researched and written by Nick Austin, a General Assistant at the Hocken. He was the 2012 Frances Hodgkins Fellow and presented the exhibition The Liquid Dossier\u00a0(16 February \u2013 13 April 2013) at the Hocken Gallery. Sitting and reading. These verbs take on a vocational significance at the\u00a0Hocken; users of our material are called\u00a0\u2018readers\u2019, after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15311,15331,15421,15409,15379,15387,15388],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives-and-manuscripts","category-ephemera-and-posters","category-exhibitions-and-events","category-university-of-otago-fellowships","category-painting-and-painters","category-printing-and-publishing","category-printmakers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}