The Devonport Flagstaff Page 18
Interview
October 30, 2015
Stitching her story from Dundee to Devonport Contemporary textile artist Freda Brierley has taken on the history of art for an upcoming exhibition Threads of Time. She has recreated renowned pieces of art – from a cave painting and Egyptian portrait all the way to works by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon – stitch by stitch on her sewing machine. She spoke to Maire Vieth. Freda Brierley uses her Bernina Virtuosa sewing machine like a paint brush, capturing light or shade often three stitches at a time. To call her technique intricate is an understatement. When I visited Brierley in her Narrow Neck home, she had just finished the golden halos of two saints. But instead of using golden thread, she had used eight different variants of yellow rayon to mix her own shade to capture the particular way gold reflects light. “I wanted to reproduce the feeling of gold without actually using it,” she said. Brierley says completing 30 pieces of art history for Threads of Time, her first solo show since 2009, has been a challenge but intensely rewarding at the same time. Born in Scotland in 1942, Brierley dreamed about going to art school from childhood. But she had to wait until she travelled across the world. Seven years after arriving in New Zealand, she fulfilled that dream when she was accepted to Whitecliffe Art School in 1989, at the age of 47. Brierley has been making art ever since. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand, the UK, the US and France. In 1995, Brierley won first prize at the Royal Easter Show and was part of a travelling exhibition to Kentucky. A year later she was part of Under the Southern Skies, a show of contemporary New Zealand art at the Barbican Theatre in London. Since 2000, she has shown at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington, the Musée Textile de Wesserling in Alsace, Christchurch Art Gallery and Auckland Museum to name just a few. Brierley has been featured in books too. Helen Schamroth’s 1998 collection 100 New Zealand Craft Artists and Ann Packer’s 2006 book Stitch: Contemporary New Zealand Artists (both published by Random House) showcase her work. Originally from Dundee, the fourth-larg-
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Stiches in time...Freda Brierley is an artist with thread in her veins est city in Scotland, Brierley settled in Devonport reluctantly more than three decades ago. Her yearning for home was the common thread in much of her previous work. Even before she left Scotland, she embroidered a simple map of her home-town. “It’s the River Tay in Dundee and the old buildings that were around at the time. The ship in the water is the whaling ship my grandfather worked on as a ship’s carpenter. The white buildings are the mental hospital. That’s where I should be,” she laughs. Describing Which Way Home, an abstract embroidery swirl of an anguished woman’s body in a tumbling sea of white, she says: “Here I am tearing myself out of the blanket of Britain, passing the standing stones, the people I left that wouldn’t grow old in my mind, I am swirling through the world and landing in this really bright place,” she says. In October 1981, New Zealand’s bright summer sun staggered Brierley after leaving Scotland at the start of winter. She still avoids it. In her lounge, she likes to keep the blinds closed during the day. Outdoor living has no appeal either. “Why on earth would you want to live in the garden?” she laughs. Brierley started embroidering as a young girl. “My mother taught me the very basics,
like lazy daisy stitches on tea cloths and chair backs. I suppose because I was an only child and the weather wasn’t good to be running around outside and we didn’t have a big garden, so it was a good way to keep me quiet,” she says. Colours were her love right from the start. “There used to be a draper’s shop quite near us and it used to have a tall cabinet full of drawers with all these embroidery colours; one drawer had every shade of red, the other every shade of blue, and so on. “My mother would often buy me a little doily with the design stamped on and allow me to have a few colours from the drawers and it was such a hard choice. I loved looking at the threads lying in rainbow-like rows in my converted biscuit tin,” says Brierley. Working with textiles was a family tradition. Her mother sewed clothes out of necessity and her grandmother had worked in one of Dundee’s jute mills since the age of 12, rising through the mill’s hierarchy to become a weaver. At school, Brierley developed a passion for drawing and painting and dreamed about studying art after graduating, but was discouraged by her parents. “My father thought it was a stupid thing to be wanting to do.