Colour in a cold climate

Rhondda Greig with Granite City, a product of Aberdeen. Picture / Martin Sykes

Rhondda Greig's last Christmas card to friends in New Zealand was a silkscreen print, In Hugo's Garden, of snails crawling around nasturtiums and other bright flowers.

It was a garden she and husband Hugo Manson planted when they moved to Scotland four years ago from their colonial country home in the Wairarapa.

Greig says it was an attempt to bring some colour into their stone surroundings.

"The environment is the complete opposite to what I have known in New Zealand. From living on a plateau that rolls out into the bigger countryside, and living under the sun and the sky, to suddenly being transported into the grey, granite, closed womb-like environment, exceedingly cold, of Aberdeen was a great shock to me," says Greig.

Her show at Waiheke Island's Green Gallery, Here There - Being in Two Places, is a response to that shock and an attempt to come to terms with the Scottish temperament and culture.

"There is a sharp intensity to the place. You have to pitch yourself against it and deal with it or you would be crushed," she says.

"Aberdeen people have great friendliness but also cautious reserve, which I am sure has a lot to do with the hardness of the environment.

"There is a wonderful saying there - the sun will come out for a few hours - and I'll bounce outside and say to the neighbour, 'It's a wonderful day', and she'll say, 'Yes, but we'll pay for it'."

While elements of her earlier work remain, including the gestural openness and the influence of Japanese calligraphy, there is also a direct exploration of her materials.

"I abandoned the brush. I used sticks and scrapers and bits of cardboard and even my fingers, making this journey of looking at this place and also looking at what oil paint could do on a surface."

The picture of the always immaculately groomed Greig working the paint with her hands like a hairy action painter may seem incongruous, but the barely contained energy of her best work has always belied her small frame.

When she came back to the brush, it was to delicately render three small paintings which comment on the Iraq war - her first attempt on such political themes. The colour, as always, is strong and direct.

"The intensity of the colours I have used has arisen from a sense of colour as having a material substance. It is not just a pigment that comes and goes but it has energy we can use emotively and symbolically," she says.

Through her long career, Greig has mixed painting with other artistic explorations.

"You bring the same sensibility to the materials you work with in any environment," she says.

Matarawa Cats, a book she wrote and illustrated, is on many children's bookshelves.

She turned her hand to fashion, designing the outfit Anna Paquin wore to pick up her Oscar.

Major site-specific works have included a large sculptured frieze at National Police Headquarters and the Landmarks Trust national monument to New Zealand women at Wellington Cathedral.

Working with expatriate architect Mark Burry, she is shortlisted for the New Zealand Memorial the Ministry of Culture and Heritage has planned for London's Hyde Park Corner.

"I never wanted to be restricted in any way to a flat surface," says Greig, who studied architecture at Auckland University.

"I always had a great interest in architecture and spatial forms and what you can do with spatial materials to create environments for human beings.

"I always wanted to be stimulated and challenged by my own environment, and it seems artists do have a wonderful opportunity to create or extend the environment, rather than just accepting the given."

Living in Britain, she has often visited the site between Hyde and Green Parks to get a sense of what may be possible.

"It is a place of remembering rather than a memorial. It does not have to be an iconic work but it has to strongly represent New Zealand culture in that environment.

"In my early months in Aberdeen I was very homesick for New Zealand, so I have been able to use that experience to think about what would be appropriate."

Greig hopes to move back to New Zealand at the end of the year, when Manson's five-year oral history research fellowship with the University of Aberdeen ends.
Until then, she will be inaugural artist in residence at the Aberdeen Art Gallery (known as the Marshall Museum after its architect), which will culminate in an exhibition there at the end of the year.

The museum has a large collection of Maori taonga, a legacy of the city's heritage as an important port, which it intends to show at the same time.

"It will allow them to give some prominence to New Zealand at that time with visiting speakers and other events," says Greig.

Exhibition

*What: Rhondda Greig, Here There - Being in Two Places
*Where and when: Green Gallery, 20 Cory Rd, Palm Beach, Waiheke, to Mar 27