Textile artist's work inspired by Goya

By GREG TREADWELL

A fabric artist embroidering the monsters of unreason has won the nation's newest and richest craft fellowship.

Waiheke-based Malcolm Harrison, 63, will interpret Goya's etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in a fabric-based work for a New Zealand audience.

To help, Creative New Zealand (CNZ) last night awarded him its inaugural $65,000 Craft/Object Art Fellowship, part of a move to support craft and object art.

The one-year fellowship is open to "jewellers, weavers and ceramicists, through to furniture makers and designers".

But CNZ is also looking for innovation. Arts board chairman Murray Shaw said, when launching the fellowship last year, that it recognised financial pressures stifled experimentation by many of these artists.

Harrison - known officially as a textile/fibre artist - won the fellowship for his "extraordinary skills and mastery of his genres, not to mention his impeccable craftsmanship, use of content, wit, [and] vivid, clever use of colour".

The first fellowship will see the artist - applauded for pushing boundaries throughout his career - return to an earlier idea, a series dubbed Euro Retro based on major European paintings.

It will be a New Zealand reading of the works but, he warns, don't look for kiwiana.

Instead, in The Sleep of Reason, look for the drama of fabrics in "deep, deep purple and red", and adjacent works in white - a table adorned by a jug by ceramicist Christine Thacker.

And, of course, monsters. Behind the sleeping artist in Francisco de Goya's picture lurks a full host of flying nasties and Harrison already has drawings for his version developing in his sketchbook.

He abandoned apocalyptic horsemen - he says he couldn't do the horses - but soon found yet more awful forms emerging.

One, in an early sketch, looks like a Ku Klux clansman. The sleep of reason.

Now his figures are developing "teeth that, as they rip and tear into something, really rip into it," says Harrison.

Some time ago, he got halfway round a Goya exhibition, he says, and almost fainted. "It's like TV during the Vietnam War. It's the same in Iraq. There was Goya, way back in the late 1700s, portraying all this brutality," he says.

There is also ongoing reference to the 14th-century, 70-scene Apocalypse Tapestry, hung in Chateau d'Angers in France.

In little more than two weeks, after the attacks on September 11, Harrison produced his own response in Wormwood, complete with childishly shaped falling figures and a winged angel.

Nearby an eyeball watches the awful events. "The whole thing was acted out on TV. My square eyes really came in handy. You don't get anywhere without pushing things a bit."

It's a different place, though, to the inner world of his recent work, a series about his relationship with his father which was neither good nor bad, really, he says, but was increasingly informing the present.

There will be memories, one large diptych suggests in mirrored text "while I still have a shadow".

In another, his father's adored spaniel Ted bounds along. "Everyone in the street took up a petition against the dog. Dad told them where they could stick it. Four or five years later Ted died and every neighbour came and said how much they missed him."

The series will be the subject of a show in Palmerston North soon.

Coming from a big Christchurch family, and as "big family stuff" went on over his head, the young Malcolm Harrison sat in a corner working, one way or another, with fabric.

"Personally it satisfied me a hell of a lot because I had actually done something."

His father was a builder, and hammers and plans fill his memories of childhood.

After a train driver, what he wanted to be was an architect, then a builder.

In the end he took up pattern drafting and a three-year apprenticeship as a window dresser. Within nine months he was dressing the front windows at DIC.

At nights he went to sewing school and yes, maybe it was brave, but then he never was part of that whole Kiwi bloke thing.

He liked the medium. It was something he did as a kid, he says. If it didn't go down well in some places, it didn't worry him.

Among his later corporate and civic commissions are Queen St's BNZ Tower and the Galleria at Parliament, for which he co-ordinated numerous fabric groups on a huge piece detailing New Zealand history and cultures.

It was, he will tell you happily, a huge undertaking.

And as for now, on "the wrong side of 60", widely acclaimed and selling works to art collections in New Zealand and overseas, is "craft" the right word?

"If they accept it as fine art," he laughs, "all their books will have to be rewritten. Get real."

It doesn't matter if they bracket you, he says, as long as they let you work.