Moving online ‘before I actually fall off the perch’
FOR the past 30 years, the world has walked through Yvonne Sutherland’s Portobello door.
But the Happy Hens owner said goodbye to visits from ‘‘fabulous’’ tourists — and hugged goodbye to locals stopping by for one last visit — as she cleared out her Otago
Peninsula shop at the weekend.
Mrs Sutherland has returned to her home studio, moving her business online ‘‘before I actually fall off the perch’’.
‘‘Creative energy just doesn’t stop — I’m not going to suddenly stop doing things, but I will miss it,’’ Mrs Sutherland said.
‘‘When you’ve been in the same place, doing the same thing, the same item, for 30 years, it is going to be a wrench, especially if you enjoy what you’re doing — and I do and did.’’
She began her business in 1984, but opened her Portobello shop in 1990, welcoming tens of thousands of visitors through her doors.
She has made hundreds of thousands of handpainted moulded liquid clay hens, either reflective of chook breeds or whimsical.
‘‘They’re instantly recognisable, they’re colourful and they’re unique,’’ Mrs Sutherland said.
Her designs have flown out the door of her home studio as licensed products such as fabric, tableware and kitchen linen on their way to international customers.
Her hens have featured in a Japanese television travel programme, six children’s books, gift cards, stationery and calendars.
‘‘I’m interested in social history,’’ Mrs Sutherland said.
‘‘I’ve read a lot of the journals from women who came out as early settlers.
‘‘And they made comments about what they had and what they wanted — and I remember [in] one journal written in North Canterbury a woman had just received with great delight her first flock of light Sussex hens from Britain.
‘‘Imagine that sailing across the world. And they had no supermarkets in those days — they [the hens] were absolutely vital to their [the settlers’] wellbeing.’’
The former art teacher fashioned the ‘‘simple shape’’ and began decorating them to represent the breeds that came out from England.
‘‘And then of course we went crazy,’’ Mrs Sutherland said.
The Covid19 lockdown and the realisation there would be fewer tourists walking through her doors had influenced her decision. She had considered shutting the shop for the past two years — ‘‘and this just seemed to be the shove’’.