Jacques Tati

 
 
 

French Vintage Posters - Part 1

 
 
 
 

Chatham Island Black Robin

 
 
 

Rudolf Boelee - Chatham Island Black Robin, acrylic, silkscreen and lacquer on board. Size 400 x 400 mm.

Available from Pug Design Store $450

The recovery of the Chatham Islands black robin from the brink of extinction is an internationally renowned conservation success story. In 1980 there were only five black robins in the world, with just a single breeding pair left. The survival of the species hinged on that last pair. A desperate and innovative management regime was quickly put into action that resulted in a successful population turnaround. Today, the population stands at around 200.This little black bird is only found on the Chatham Islands. Numbers remain stable, but because it still has such a small population it is classified as critically-endangered.

Cassandra Fusco - Fabric representations, the retro, modern and contemporary work of Robyne Voyce - Takahe 68

 
 
 
 

Robyne Voyce is fabric artist known throughout New Zealand for her innovative textile explorations of the possibilities of colour and non-representational abstract forms. Her early work in fashion and furniture design propelled her in the 1980s to become an independent studio-based fabric artist, working primarily with original and recycled vintage printed textiles which she combines to form simultaneous fields of structured pattern, vivid, fluid and sculptural.

Together with her partner and fellow artist, Rudolf Boelee, Voyce operated the Opshop Art & Design Gallery, concurrent with part-time tertiary level art and design teaching. While Voyce has now retired from teaching, she continues to run workshops in the fields of surface design, textile collage and quilt construction and has recently opened Pug Design Store in central Christchurch.

Now, in mid-career, Voyce has a substantial body of work in private, corporate, and institutional collections. In various sizes and formats they can be divided into at least three broad themes: floral imagery, autobiographical recollection and geometry and. This concentration is the result of two decades of distillation as careful and disciplined as her aesthetic ethos.


The quilted, screen-print triptych, Chrysanthemums (2005), one of a whole series of floral works, gives an early indication of Voyce’s conceptual approach to design, modular and layered. Turning a favourite piece of old lace into a screen-print, Voyce both replicates and re-arranges a single chrysanthemum. The simplicity of the design is deceptive. “While many European countries consider them as strictly funerary flowers, this particular 16-floret variety called ‘Ichimonjiginu’ was once the crest and official seal of the Emperor of Japan. Muriel Spark has her character Miss Jean Brodie refer to them as ‘serviceable flowers’ and a Chinese philosopher wrote, ‘If you would be happy for a lifetime, grow Chrysanthemums.’ They were part of my childhood.”

Born into “a fairly typical New Zealand family, mum and dad, two boys and a girl”, Voyce spent much of her childhood reading Ladybird Books, enchanted with their illustrations and colour relations and the world these constructed.

“The ‘Five Little Kittens’, the adventures of Jane and Peter, Susan and Mary, and the ‘Third Book of English Native Birds’ were amongst my favourites and I have kept these. In the 1970s there were simply no New Zealand equivalents. Our sense of identity was barely nascent, our role models came from Britain and everything British was automatically credited with being superior. Now, as a New Zealand artist, I return to these childhood sources for a variety of reasons.”


“In childhood the Ladybird books offered us reflections of a cosy, untrammelled albeit English childhood and, undoubtedly, helped me not only with learning how to read, but also lead me to discovering the magic and plurality of pattern and colour. The stories and their wonderful characters were illustrated by a bevy of really talented artists.”

“Their writers included amongst others: Vera Southgate, A J MacGregor, Noel Barr, L Du Garde Peach, Sheila McCullagh, Sir Paul McCartney, Spike Milligan and Jayne Fisher, who at the age of six started her Garden Gang series. And their illustrators included A J MacGregor, Robert Lumley, Eric Winter, C. F. Tunnicliffe and Harry Wingfield (who was responsible for over a third of the artwork for the Key Words Reading Scheme books known as the ‘Peter and Jane’ books. I consider that these little books, as much as our old family home in Bryndwr, and my professional design training and art tutelage and, particularly, the work of Sonia Delaunay, have remained a seminal influence in my work.”


“In part this is due to my growing appreciation the intricacies and ethos behind the production of these modest little books. Their original format, 56 pages (made from just one sheet size 40 inches by 30 inches) and their cost (two shillings and six pence) remained the same for 29 years. They sprang from a time of reasoned economy but offered immense imaginative richness. And, although English and not New Zealand based, they are recognised as universally accessible and are translated into over 80 languages. My appreciation of them is also due to the fact that now, as a mature artist, I am able to reflect upon these and other childhood influences and evaluate them, secure in my own personal and cultural identity – a New Zealand artist.”


From the 1990s onwards, Voyce relinquished conventional notions of representation associated with perspective and began employing a cell-like approach to form and structure. “I began combining modular 2-D and 3-D affects and extended this play of surface and structure by adding actual blocks and eventually combining these with printed fabrics to reference experience, recollection, reflection and change.” This was developed in screen-print and fabric works not so much with either a strong Kiwi or English accent, but more with an international Modernist intonation and using materials that reflected the realities of industrial design and production.


“Ever since I can remember, textiles and patterns and geometry have been an important part of my life. The malleability and versatility of fabric allows for a rich recording and exploration of layers; of thoughts and feelings and events and geometry provides both the discipline and harmony.”


“In my work the placement of every piece is crucial; nothing in design is arbitrary. I use fragments of particular textiles and patterns in what is called ‘simultaneous design’, that is where one design when placed next to another, affects both, as in Apron Strings (2004) where horizontal, vertical and diagonal patterns accentuate the behaviour of the narrative elements, the five Ladybird mischievous kitten. I frequently merge such images from childhood reading into my designs where they function like texts or narratives in plays of image and pattern, diffusions and interactions. And, of course, in this respect, my work has been greatly influenced by Sonia Delaunay who pioneered this integrated form of work. My work forms relationships that may, hopefully, strike cords with others.”


Works inspired by childhood influences and ruminations formed the core of two major Voyce exhibitions: ‘Bryndwr 17’ (2004) at the Centre of Contemporary Art and ‘I Want What She’s Got’ (2007) at the NG Gallery, Christchurch. Whereas the work in ‘Bryndwr 17’ clearly employs autobiography but register convincingly as much more than a ‘slice-of-life’ memoir or criticism, developments reminiscent of hard-edge abstraction shape the consumer appetites addressed in ‘I Want What She’s Got’.


‘Bryndwr 17’ takes its name from the bus route used by the artist in the 1960s, travelling from her suburban, red-brick home (subsequently converted into a church), to the centre of Christchurch. The works allude not only the physical markers that became imprinted on the young woman’s mind, but also, perhaps more importantly, a psychological and philosophical re-membering of parts. Parts because as Voyce indicates, memory is partial and highly selective. The artist’s intention with ‘Bryndwr 17’ is the recollection, sorting and re-assembling of the building blocks of her childhood. ‘Bryndwr 17’ was, unlike the Ladybird world of Jane and Peter, Mary or Susan, complete with imperfections.


Referring to ‘Bryndwr 17’, Voyce comments that an elderly friend and neighbour, Marjory, ignited in her child’s mind an awareness of conditioning, and the importance of culture, fairness and empathy. She frequently visited Marjory Gussette , whose family fled Italy during the Risorgimento. “Marjory and her husband were committed Labour supporters. In their home they had a picture of Michael (Mickey) Joseph Savage. As a child I thought he was some sort of religious figure; they held him in such high esteem. But, over time, they explained to me the man’s principals, and his belief in conducting life in a fair and meaningful way. My parents considered politics a highly private matter and it was never discussed in our home. Thanks to the Gussette’s, however, I learnt to question and evaluate all sorts of things, and I also learnt the importance of perseverance and determination, lessons that have stood me in good stead in my adult life.”


Out of Apron Strings, Birds Eye and Poppies (all 2004), a constellation of Ladybird ‘icons’ shines. They are literally pages cut loose from any sense of continuous narrative and mounted on polystyrene ‘bricks’ painted with Karen Walker Resene colours. The affect is both intriguing and accessible, decollage images and fabrics.

Picture a well-worn family picnic blanket where crowded, quilted patterns (just like individuals) jostle, and monetarily nestle into focus before breaking into another run, another pattern. All the patches are deliberately skewed, perhaps to suggest wear and tear, perhaps even familial tensions and the will to cut loose.

Calmer, more spacious and fluid, Birds Eye literally pin-points six native English birds, straight out of Voyce’s Ladybird treasury. “In my childhood, books on New Zealand flora and fauna were rare. Only later in life did I come to know anything about our native species, their extinction, and the loss of habitat that has left many endangered. As beautiful as the English birds in Birds Eye appear, they are in fact cited in as colonisers. And of course there is the playful resonance of ‘Birds Eye’ frozen foods - the bain of many Kiwi kids’ lives. These ‘building blocks of despoilation’ are, however, juxtaposed with the wide meanders of a vintage New Zealand Modern textile, reminiscent of our unique braided rivers so that there is a play between the introduced elements and that which is native and unique.”


Voyce continues her explorations of past influences in Poppies (2004). Garnered from ‘The Inquisitive Mouse’ Ladybird book, the interlocking cells of Poppies appear composed and cohesive: a child carries and intends to release a field mouse that has come inside her comfy domestic world. But the narrative elements are in fact gently jumbled. The jumble of Susan and mouse images is subtly controlled within the printed trellis geometry evocative of the gardens of suburbia and a desire for order. Only the title hints at the freedom (in the ideal rural world of the book) to which the mouse is to be returned – fields of wheat and barely flecked through with poppies. Ultimately the work conjures the selective and fluid arrangements of memory.


Chimpanzee Tea Party (2004) is another memory fabric. The work springs from biography; childhood trips to Wellington Zoo. A father and a child mesmerized by the tea party of a bevy of chimpanzees. The background to the work might well represent a light, picnic table cloth. But the modular, printed blocks that build this ‘memory’ form a weighty knot, a conundrum. A doleful chimpanzee is sited above that of two Japanese women engaged in a tea ceremony. The juxtaposition of the apparently wild and the civilized is deliberately prickly and is neither softened nor explained away by the surrounding Rorschach-like inkblot insects. The background picnic cloth and the edgy narrative of disparate blocks simultaneously create a tension of difference, one that invites consideration of the affects of conditioning, culture and change.


Change and alterations also shape Installation 3 (2004). Initially it registers as a work in progress. Its Leggo-like ‘bricks’ and unfinished edges invite completion or perhaps even re-arrangement. Still under construction (gathering experience perhaps?), specific patterns and numbers envelope polystyrene bricks. Here and there repetitions assert a special significance and order while the stitching throughout is a testament to thought, time and effort. Installation 3 is a geometry of many intersections and interaction. Visually tactile and conceptually complex, it foreshadows the hard-edge geometry employed in ‘I Want What She’s Got’ (2007).


Throughout ‘I Want What She’s Got’ the childhood blocks of Ladybird motifs have been supplanted with red, white and blue printed declarations. But like the former, the more recent works spell out a specific era and its demise: free love and peace, in Summer of Love; and blood, sweat and tears, and love, hate and revenge in Texas Gold. The title work, I Want What She’s Got (2007), offers a cruciform of Voyce’s signature building blocks printed with a glamorous female and multiple dollar signs and numerals placed on a bold ground of striped mattress ticking.


Voyce says that both Summer of Love ( 2004) and Texas Gold (2004) where shirt lengths given to her as a teenager by her brother who asked that she make him some groovy shirts. This did not happen. Instead the artist kept the fabric and only returned to it decades later when gathering resources for a body of work concerned with consumerism. “Those shirt lengths, from an era when some people did actually make their own shirts, were so totally right for my purposes; they were authentic elements left over from a more idealistic time, Woodstock and ‘Ban the Bomb’, etc.”


Both ‘Bryndwr 17’ and ‘I Want What She’s Got’ can be described as synchronic in that both bodies of work take clusters of images and language from particular periods of time: the artist’s childhood in 1970s New Zealand suburbia; and, some thirty years on, the world on the turn of the new millennium, increasingly self-devoured by consumerism. The ideal worlds both of these respective periods appeared to offer are remembered, deconstructed and re-membered by Voyce, physically and metaphorically. In his review of ‘I Want What She’s Got’, art critic Bill Dudley phrased the work as “succinctly encapsulating a modern malaise, the eternal quest for the desirable and the glamorous”. He concluded that “Voyce’s approach to and use of original vintage fabric designs amounts to a flawless praxis and delivered both unexpected and powerful Constructivist-like compositions and lessons in deconstruction.”


‘Compositions’ (2007) continues this approach but with a difference. There is no hint of disappointment or disillusion, only a confident re-construction of vintage New Zealand fabrics, reconstituted, as in translation, to bring them to life again for another generation.


Voyce comments that she has long admired designs from the Maurice Kain workshop. Kain’s organisation started out over 55 years ago in Dunedin as a modest drapery concern. It developed a strong in-house design team and is now recognised as one of New Zealand’s most innovative textile designers. In Composition 3 and Composition 6 ( both 2007), Voyce has taken two lengths of the ‘Liverno’ design by Kain and revitalized their central pattern, reconstructing them as a closed, and an open, flowing motif in triptych format. She has, as it were, extended the rhythmic and associational possibilities of the original and it is interesting the compare these works with the earlier Chrysanthemums series.


‘Compositions’ such as these of specific Modernist fabrics, can only be undertaken because this artist has a sound grasp of the rational behind the original and because she has the self-confidence, vision and ability to do so. This is brave territory, technically, aesthetically and philosophically. Some might say it raises issues of encroachment or even appropriation. But Voyce insists that her reconstituted works are a re-vitalising of designs that have or might otherwise have fallen from view. “I think of fabrics and designs produced by people like Annie Albers of Bauhaus fame, May Morris and the New Zealand designer, Avis Higgs and I am convinced that as a medium, textile and design can function as wonderful indices of a time and its achievements. As clichéd as it may sound, fabric is, literally, an ideal resource for exploring and commenting upon all manner of things and, an artist, I find that it is particularly suited to the design and psychological layering I am interested in.


“I am fascinated in how we perceive and record the fabric of our lives, experience and how we develop these faculties. I am also interested in the significance and symbolism of designs and references, exploring and questioning these. Few objects are value-free and decoration for decoration’s sake is rare, perhaps even a bit meaningless. I think this is why my partner and I have an abiding interest in Modern design and designers. Whether or not movements like the Bauhaus succeeded, they were, I believe, trying to make rational, useful and meaningful objects widely available, as opposed to just consumerist baubles.”


“While much of my early work drew upon mimesis or figurative forms, my work is currently exploring more formalistic designs. That said, obviously there is dialogue between the two approaches. Abstraction, after all is built knowledge of structure and rational design.”



Robyne Voyce is an able and articulate artist. If ‘Bryndwr 17’ (2004) charted an excursion back in time to early childhood in order to make sense out of the present, then ‘I Want What She’s Got’ (2007) continued that journey. What Voyce’s current developments demonstrate is that she (like many of us) is trying to make sense of the present and is doing so in an increasing spare and sculptural language.

Since the 1980s Robyne Voyce and Rudolf Boelee have collected furniture, ceramics and objects from the immediate postwar period. This interest led in 1994 to the acquisition of the Crown Lynn New Zealand name, which was the former trade mark of Crown Lynn Potteries Limited. Voyce and Boelee have developed a range of tea towels, cushions and art patterned with iconic Crown Lynn designs.

The work of Jewish-Russian-French artist Sonia (Terk) Delaunay (1885-1979), included the concepts of geometric abstraction, the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing and extends to painting, textile design and stage set design. Together with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, she was instrumental in the founding of the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Delaunay was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964 and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Honour.

Rorschach inkblot test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex scientifically derived algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect an underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly.