Artist appeals for public reaction on suffrage memorial

The creator of the threatened Khartoum Place suffrage centenary memorial, Jan Morrison, is appealing for public reaction to Auckland City Council's plans to demolish the tiled artwork.

"If anything is to be saved, this is the time. A lot of people haven't clicked to what is going on," she said last night from her Arrowtown home.

The $75,000 memorial was unveiled 12 years ago by then Governor-General Dame Catherine Tizard to celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage.

Morrison said the people behind the redesign plans "want the mural out. They don't want the colour and the women thing."

However, she said she had been given the final say at a meeting on Monday with architect Kevin Brewer, winner of the design competition for the $2 million upgrade of Khartoum Place, near the Auckland Art Gallery.

"He basically said, if I say no [to it going] then it's no. It can stay.

"I feel between a rock and a hard place. I'm not sure what to say. I'm feeling quite isolated," Morrison said.

With Claudia Pond Eyley, co-artist on the project, she agreed to consider three options. One was to keep the mural within Mr Brewer's proposed redesign of Khartoum Place.

The second option was to demolish the large mural, with its four levels and waterfalls built round a staircase, and create a new mural.

The third option was to create a mural against an embankment in Freyberg Place or at the Myers Park entrance next to the White House brothel in Queen St.

Mr Brewer and Morrison agreed that trying to remove the tiles and resite them was unrealistic because too many would break.

Morrison wanted to keep the mural in Khartoum Place but she said Mr Brewer did not want the tiles.

When the council notified her of its plans to redesign Khartoum Place, Morrison said that initially "I was just prepared to roll over because they told me it was going. I thought, oh my God, that's it."

Then she became "furious". While agreeing to work through alternatives, she now felt the planned destruction of the memorial was wrong.

Mr Brewer, whose firm Brewer Davidson and landscape architect Leo Jew won a design competition for Khartoum Place in July, said none of the 12 entrants envisaged keeping the memorial.

A council spokesman said "the bottom line is we haven't made a decision about the future of the tiles in Khartoum Place".

* Should the memorial go or stay. Send an email to the New Zealand Herald newsdesk (link below).