Places of interest |
|
If walls have memories, the two old buildings that make up Janet Green’s studio and living space have a rich past to look back on. The Masterton ceramic artist works in a transplanted Wairarapa schoolroom that once sheltered generations of children drowsing over their maths problems in the afternoon sunshine. The former Salvation Army church hall that now stands next to it must have hosted many a troupe of boy scouts, saluting the Queen and learning how to adjust their woggles. Today it provides Janet’s living area, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a tiny mezzanine room.
“One of my friends said to me, ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a church or a schoolhouse and you’ve got both’,” says Janet. “I felt a bit like I should apologise.”
Janet at work on heads for a recent exhibition, Persons of Interest.
Janet has taken these quirky old spaces, with their spacious chapel ceilings and tall windows, and made them her own. But they are still clearly working spaces, enlivened by her comfortable, slightly battered furniture and the warmth of sunlight on old wood.
 The machinery of creativity and inspiration is out on show – tools, books, postcards, artworks from all quarters, a home-made potter’s wheel that belonged to a friend (“the wheel on the bottom is from a Bren gun carrier, apparently”) – but nothing here feels cluttered or crowded. The quiet gaze of old Buddhas and the serenely impassive masks of Janet’s own pieces make sure of that: who could feel hurried with them around?
By her own admission, Janet is “a bit of a nomad”. She first moved to Masterton in 2000 and lived in a charming but slightly ramshackle “Miss Haversham” cottage with a wraparound verandah, a 2.5ha garden and bees (featured in NZ House & Garden, March 2004). It was beautiful but the gardening was keeping Janet away from her ceramics and by late 2004 “it just got too much”.
Serendipitously, the owner of a nearby vine-yard had subdivided it into small blocks and moved the former Masterton Salvation Army church hall on to one of the sections. Though he’d restored it sympathetically, it lingered on unsold. Says Janet, “People came in and said, ‘It’s no good because it hasn’t got a kitchen’.”
Which was not quite true. Then, as now, it had a single bench with a sink, a stove and a dishwasher. There were no cupboards, but luckily Janet had cupboards for Africa. Or, more accurately, from Indonesia. She bought the property, commandeering the old hall’s spare bedroom as a studio. Then a friend of a friend mentioned that they had a schoolroom sitting in the middle of a paddock where they wanted to grow truffles.
The antique ladder perched against the mezzanine floor was originally twice the length; the artwork beside it is by Gavin Chilcott.
The old schoolhouse was moved on to Janet’s section in 2007, providing a spacious new studio. She painted one interior wall white but the others still have their original boards in a picturesquely battered patchwork of colours. “I’ve got this urge to paint it all white but everyone who comes here says, ‘Don’t paint it!’”
Janet’s furniture and most of her antique pieces come from Indonesia, where she spent two years working on a New Zealand government aid project with the potters of Lombok.
The wooden benches and ornately carved cupboard in the living area were bought in “a sort of yard in a mosque in Java”, where they had evidently languished for some time.
A bench found in a Javanese mosque sits outside Janet’s bedroom.
“They were covered – encrusted – in mud and filth. I loved them! When I got them back home, I cleaned them with a toothbrush.”
Indonesia also provided one of Janet’s most profound artistic influences, in the form of Java’s ancient temple of Borobudur. The enigmatic monkey heads, Buddha-like faces and begging bowls, complete with ceramic fish, that punctuate her house and studio were inspired by the gigantic votive images she saw there.
Janet seems to have an affinity for ancient faces. Her most recent exhibition, Persons of Interest, held at Wellington’s Avid Gallery in June, was a line-up of vividly coloured heads that hark back to the Cycladic heads of early Greece. It’s a time and a tradition that Janet got to know very well in the 1980s, when she spent five years working with ancient Greek vases and pottery as a conservator of ceramics with the British Museum. (She has also worked on archaeological sites in Cyprus and Turkey as a conservator for the University of Edinburgh and the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara.)
So why call her exhibition Persons of Interest? “I was listening to a crime report on National Radio while racking my brains for a name,” Janet explains. And, as Wellingtonians will know, Avid Gallery is opposite the Central Police Station…
“You have an idea and it transmogrifies into something else. It can be a mixture of all different influences and ideas and experiences.” Not so different from a house then.
Story: Jane Hurley
Photographs: Brent Darby / narratives
| 
|
| 
