Suzie Moncrieff

The creator

Words: Bess Manson Photo: Ross Giblin

If Dame Suzie Moncrieff’s kitchen table could talk it might tell you about the time she dressed a kunekune pig in a tutu for her World of WearableArt show. It might recall myriad other animals cast in the unique arts and performance show, from sheep and hens to a rather nasty swan – a snappy little bugger bent on terrorising the models.

The World of WearableArt (WOW) may well have graduated from a marquee in a Nelson paddock to a twoweek, multimillion-dollar earner run in the capital, but that kitchen table remains the nerve centre of the ‘‘wearables’’.

It’s seen a lot of good times. Many glasses of wine have been sunk around that slab of rimu while the vision has been nurtured and massaged into a reality, Moncrieff, 67, says.

They were fun times in those early days, when there was nothing to lose.

She recalls one evening planning one of the first shows and having the exceptional idea of inviting French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier over from Paris.

‘‘I remember sitting there in my nightie dialling up International directory and asking for his number. We got it and we got through to his people but we never heard anything back from them, of course. It was a good laugh, though. We’d had a few glasses of wine but those were the sorts of things we did in those days and it was jolly good fun.’’

Moncrieff, draped in layers of black, her hair swept into a loose bun, knew she was on to something special when she started WOW. A driving ambition and an innate belief in herself and the idea have proved her right.

Two hundred people turned up to that first show on a rainy spring night in 1987. Not bad for a low key country arts gig.

‘‘I look back to those days as probably the most fun on my journey with WOW. We were constantly flying by the seat of our pants.’’

Money was tight and Moncrieff, twice divorced and raising her daughter alone, struggled. She signed on for the dole when things got really tough.

‘‘I remember sitting in front of this man with a comb-over at the social welfare office and him saying to me ‘what is it that you actually do?’ I told him I was running the WearableArts show. He said, ‘I can’t see any call for that. I’m going to put you down for Sealord’s to fillet fish.’

‘‘I went home and thought ‘I’m not doing that’ so I just never turned up.’’

The first show cost her and her friends their own time and what they found at the dump. ‘‘I learned to be very frugal. For the first few years the dump was my biggest resource for props.

‘‘My daughter and I were living on the smell of an oily rag. We’d sit at the table and laugh about the amount of rice we had to eat because we couldn’t afford to buy a lot of groceries. It’s amazing how good Vegemite tastes with rice.’’

These days her team of 350, with backers like the Wellington City Council, spend millions putting on the two-week springtime season of WOW.

The rewards are big, with $26 million pumped into the city over the WOW season.

Born Suzanne Dick, Moncrieff was born in Hope, near Nelson in the 1950s, the second of four children.

Her father built his own sawmill and worked from a forest block on the Moutere hills. He had his own dance band, The Hoofbeats, and played all the local dances. Sometimes Moncrieff would be allowed to tag along and play piano with the band.

Her mother was a beautiful singer and at one point had her own comedy act that involved a couple of live chooks stuffed down her top which she would whip out at at the end of the skit.

‘‘I thought what my parents did – singing and dancing and pulling chickens from your underclothes – was terribly normal and what all parents did, but apparently it wasn’t.’’

She took art at Waimea College and excelled so applied to art school. It was one of the great disappointments of her life that she was turned down, though in retrospect, she’s rather glad life had other plans for her.

Instead she went to teachers’ college in Christchurch but pulled out after a year. She married at 20 and had her daughter Emma, now an artist, at 23.

Art disappeared from her life throughout her 20s. In her 30s, after the break-up of her marriage, she got back into sculpting and had a sell-out show in Wellington. But when the cheque arrived showing the gallery’s cut she was shocked. ‘‘I thought, blow this, I’m going to open my own gallery.’’

In a converted cottage in the backblocks of Nelson she opened the William Higgins Gallery, named after the man who built it, and ran it with a co-op of seven other artists.

Moncrieff, who now lives on a 10-hectare farm in the hills above Ruby Bay, just south of Motueka, came across the idea of wearable art through a show in Auckland.

But she was horribly disappointed to find nothing but a few tie-dyed silk frocks.

‘‘I thought ‘that’s no wearable art’. On the plane coming home I decided putting on a wearable art show would be a great idea to promote the gallery.’’

The original prize pool of $1000 is now a massive $160,000. There’s a board and teams of people marketing and promoting the event. It’s a beast of a thing.

The move to Wellington in 2005 was the hardest decision she’s ever made, Moncrieff says. ‘‘I got a lot of glares and a bit of verbal abuse.’’

Letters to the editor published in The Nelson Mail back then were vitriolic – ‘betrayed’, ‘a kick in the teeth’, ‘high treason’. People were mad as hell that the show they had supported over the years – something they viewed as utterly Nelson – was grown up and moving away from home.

But Moncrieff, who was made a Dame in 2011, says it was the only way to go. There was no room for her vision to grown in Nelson.

Lately she’s stepped back a little to focus on WOW’s future, handing the reins to a creative team. It’s time to focus on taking the show out further into the world. Big-picture stuff.

That old rimu table, it’ll be all ears.

‘‘We were constantly flying by the seat of our pants.’’