Art captures Temuka man’s ‘tragic life’
The great-granddaughter of Temuka’s Alfred William Surridge is celebrating his courage and resourcefulness with a museum exhibition.
Using only materials available during her great-grandfather’s lifetime of 1852 to 1914, Nelson artist Sue Heydon created a bird cage, copper feather, and hand-beaten candle to symbolise her ancestor’s ‘‘tragic life’’ – now on display at the South Canterbury Museum.
‘‘That’s a very important part of my work, that the materials and the methods of manufacture are authentic,’’ Heydon said.
‘‘I had to get it right because I was serious in my intent to say something about him.’’
Heydon will be bringing ‘‘balance’’ to her exhibition with an illustrated talk about Surridge’s wife at the museum today at 2pm.
Surridge was just 16 when he sailed to Lyttelton from London on January 7, 1875. The four-month trip aboard the Tintern Abbey, commissioned by the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, delivered 309 government emigrants and 870 English birds to the island nation.
He married Heydon’s greatgrandmother, Emily, in 1880 and established a signwriting, paperhanging, and painting business in Temuka.
‘‘He also sold oysters. He cleaned chimneys, he was a newspaper runner. He had a big family to feed.’’
Emily died aged 32 in 1894 – compelling a ‘‘heartbroken’’ Surridge to flee to a hut on Opihi River, leaving Heydon’s 5-year-old grandmother and her six siblings to be raised by other family members.
Surridge drowned on December 24, 1914.
Heydon said the bird cage and feather drew parallels between Surridge and the English birds that he emigrated to New Zealand with, as both were confined before being released into a new land.
The candle served as a memorial to him, she said.
Heydon will wear her greatgrandmother’s shawl and display a bible filled with her ancestor’s doodles at the illustrated talk at 2pm.
‘‘On every blank page, she’s tried to sign her married name. This young, excited girl was looking forward to the future and escaping her family,’’ she said.
‘‘I still haven’t completed my research on Emily and I’m hoping at the floor talk more information comes to light.
‘‘The story goes on. I can never find everything.’’
Heydon said she began researching her great-grandparents about three years ago and had received a lot of help from historians and genealogists around South Canterbury.
‘‘It’s been really lovely to have these people ferreting out this information.’’ I’ve driven by this water trough on so many of my journeys to the Mackenzie I thought that this time I’d better stop and check it out to see what it actually was. There are some fabulous memorials in and around Cave to the Burnett family and this is just another example, a drinking trough constructed of local stone for passing stock to drink from. Inscriptions on the trough tell that it was built by ‘grateful ratepayers to commemorate the work of Thomas David Burnett in fostering the Downlands water supply’. The scheme was started to ensure an adequate supply of water for an area which had been subject to drought and still exists today. The very appealing inscription attributed to L.M. MacDonald reads as follows:
Here weary beasts shall drink for many a day,
Here travellers shall rest beside the way,
And think upon the man whose wise forethought
Such lasting work of loving kindness wrought.
As he once stood, his monument shall stand,
A steadfast witness in a changing Land.
T.D. Burnett is the second son of Andrew and Catherine Burnett. Madeleine Child, Toggle, 2018-2019
On display at the Aigantighe Art Gallery is a ceramic exhibition by Dunedin artist, Madeleine Child – Neither Fish Nor Flesh Nor Good Red Herring.
Child’s playful installation of new ceramics looks back to the history of Japanese Netsukes (a small toggle used for attaching a container to the sash of a kimono); she used these miniature sculptural forms as a springboard to create her own toggles.
Then, Child recalls being given some homegrown knobbly potatoes.
‘‘Instead of eating them, I stuck them on nails in the studio where they continued to sprout bulbous noses ( . . . I then modelled) some raw clay heads (after them) with monster grog stuck in, and then I poked in other bits of fired ceramic.’’
Through the process of morphing and evolving, these ceramic sculptures seem both strange and familiar – like clusters of barnacles washed up after a ferocious storm, having been loosened from kelp holdalls, they are fragments of coral-likecreatures from the deep.
These artworks make the viewer think about how things evolve. For Child, they remind her of the Poke´ mon – a Japanese game that generates a fictional universe of evolving creatures that are trained to battle with other creatures.
Furthermore, and highlighting He was born on November 25, 1877 at Cave and educated at Timaru Boys’ High School.
He proved himself to be a hard and focused worker and driven local and national level politician, MP for Temuka from 1919 until his death in 1941, who achieved a great deal over his lifespan, in particular for his much loved South Canterbury and Mackenzie country.
He was behind the building of St David’s Pioneer Memorial Church at Cave in 1930, also paying for and erecting the memorials at Burkes Pass, Mackenzie Pass and Cave Hill.
He had a lifelong interest in pastoral matters and his knowledge of high-country farming was profound. A strong advocate of tree planting and co-operative farming, a specialist in Merino sheep who also studied to understand the causes and prevention of erosion and rivers of the region.
As well as managing several family properties he was an advocate for education and established the Strathona Hostel for the training of young women in home craft with a view to assisting on farms, this institute being the first of its kind in the Dominion.
I am sure he’d be well pleased with such a practical and lasting memorial.
- Karen Rolleston the fact that the artist is not seeking to control the art making process, Child playfully shapes her materials, leaving her mark in the handling, fondling and fiddling of clay as she moulds her sculptural forms.
Child embraces the fight against gravity, allowing elements of randomness and the accidental in her ceramics. She describes the sculptures as having a ‘‘gay abandonment . . . like this long limbed dancing woman my father made from a piece of driftwood (she was) stuck on a cowrie shell base with a cockle shell for her head and limpet shells for breasts’’.
All together, these sprouting potatoes with netsuke otherness, and these slurping barnacles with flinging limbs make you stop, laugh and contemplate.
This exhibition runs until April 28 at the Aigantighe Art Gallery.