Category: Uncategorized

  • Conversation and Cloth

    On Friday this week there was the latest in the series of Conversation and Cloth, the talks about textiles in the collection. Taking place in the Regent Theatre, the talk was well-attended with twenty people coming along, and a couple more on Zoom, to listen to news about the most recent acquisitions and about plans…

  • The West Coast Cloth Company

    The West Coast Cloth Company

    The street frontage of the textile studio in the heart of Māwhera/ Greymouth is complete. Over the past few months two local artists have been working with me to create the new logo for the West Coast Cloth Company. The logos have now been printed and installed on the windows of the studio and above…

  • All about the blog

    This is a week of change, for the blog and for the studio, and I am looking for your help. For the past twenty years I have written blog entries on all sorts of subjects. There have been articles on nature, weaving, crafts, painting, writing, landscape, travelling… the list goes on. Over the years the…

  • Design Lessons from Nature

    The library in the studio in Māwhera Greymouth has as section of books about design, amongst them some that relate to nature. A 1974 edition of Design Lessons from Nature has just been added to that collection. Written by Benjamin deBrie Taylor and published in the United States, the book contains the “substance of talks…

  • Basotho blankets

    The textile collection continues to grow and so does the cataloguing. The most recent addition to the catalogue, thanks to our Canadian friend, Karen, who volunteers time to do this research and to write up the texts for the website, are the Basotho blankets. These particular examples are common across South Africa. Locally produced, they…

  • What’s on the playlist

    This week the playlist features Sámi by Black Magdalene ​Based in Eugene, Oregon, this darkwave ensemble was formed in 2011. Darkwave is a music genre that evolved from post-punk and New Wave movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dakota by The Stereophonics This Welsh band had their first number one on the UK singles…

  • This week’s blog

    Dear readers, This week the enormous crates and boxes arrived from the UK in Greymouth. The task ahead is mammoth – how to pack the Shetland studio into a much smaller space in New Zealand – but already most of the boxes are unwrapped and the contents stored. It feels very good to have everything…

  • Waitangi Day

    This coming week is the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi/ Te Tiriti o Waitangi. New Zealand Aotearoa marks the signing of this historic documentation on Thursday 6th January: Waitangi Day. Māwhera Greymouth will be holding its Waitangi Day Celebration in Dixon Park from 11am with kai and food, waiata and singing,…

  • Creativity wins out

    The experience of writing the blog this week has been… well… interesting. Each week I work on the blog for four or five hours. I select the stories that I want to tell, many from conversations that have occurred throughout the week or from events in the news. Sometimes I approach the blog with nothing…

  • Tracks from the Spotify playlist

    This week the playlist features these tracks. Kara Toprak (Black Earth) by Fazil Say and Hunter Noak Fazil Say, the Turkish composer and pianist, meets Hunter Noak, a classical pianist, in this opening piece on the playlist. Australian Aboriginal Music by Didgeridoo Aboriginal Dreamtime. The didgeridoo (officially spelt as “Didjeridu”) of Australia is ancient, at…