‘My work is my way of coming out of the darkness and finding the light’

“It’s like a Tupperware party but with me, my art and no Tupperware,” she says. “From a business point of view, I have 100 per cent control. People rarely buy my work unless they have a connection to it. There’s the intellectual or investment angle, and then there’s the gut response. That’s where I make my artwork from, and that’s where people usually connect to it. The art houses are very low-key - I’m not a particularly scary person, and I usually trip over or spill something on myself. People seem to like the experience.”

Fleur’s future looks bright for 2020 and beyond, with commissions lining up for paintings, portraiture and other works. She’s proud to have come this far. “It’s lovely to be earning a good living and not having to compromise my work. The art of it is the most important thing. I believe that I have something original to say and that I have a long way to go. But the art of it comes first.”

That also means exploring new territory in the form of painting, spurred by a request by a long-term buyer who wanted her to “make a painting on material that looks like it came out of a dumpster”. “I did it on metal, and it took about a year. When I delivered it, she cried because it was so awesome. That was the beginning.”

Fleur describes her painted works - which sell as soon as she can finish them - as “mark-making with paint”. “I can’t ‘draw’, but I am purposefully not trying to learn like I didn’t learn to ‘design’. I trust my aesthetic and my voice, and I’m loving it. It’s a very visceral thing. I know how to take photographs; I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I’m not bored by it, but I know everything technically about the medium. I often purposefully make the photographs look quite rough because that’s the feeling I’m going for. But with working with painting and metal, I’m flying in the dark.”

This kind of darkness is one in which she’s comfortably uncomfortable. “It’s extraordinary when you’ve lived with these shadows all your life not to have them anymore. My favourite book is We’re Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. The idea behind it is that you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go through it. At my worst, life felt completely black. But the key to being able to get through is to find beauty in life.”

“Experiencing the moods and changes of the river is one of the nicest things about living in Whanganui,” Fleur says. “Walking beside it everyday centres and calms me, and Seth loves it.”