In Her Own Words

The other Curriculum Vitae (life’s course), begun as more of a list but it has turned out actually looking like an eulogy.

I was born halfway through a storm, a night, year and century.

The family home on Kangaroo Island was my home until my early 20’s. On this island my pictures began with permission to draw on walls and verandas. Then at our school in Kingscote, a time for work books and intense projects on Rubber and Egypt. A chance for dreaming, watching the seasons in our scrublands and crawling in drains to the Harbour. Friday afternoons were for drawing with crayons, unsupervised while our very overworked teachers had a good lie down outside.

At home our father made a generator so we could listen to the radio, the wireless, which was full of wires. As an Argonaut, Phidias (Jeffrey Smart) was my - and hundreds of other Australian children - ‘teacher on the air’. He described the great art of the world for us, received and replied to our letters and remembered us years later.

Then to Australia, Adelaide for my senior school years attending as a boarder at Walford, a school for girls. I loved the studies in humanities and science, being taught by often really exceptional women. This was a meeting with an even wider world. On Friday afternoons, I was taken by a kind mother, Janet Browning, to draw and paint sitting at Ruth Tuck’s kitchen table - a special art school for children. We listened avidly to Ruth’s stories of who was with whom where and when in our city, and equally detailed, wonderful accounts of artists, how they lived and worked, about their pictures and sculptures. And sometimes the names of their cats and dogs.

My school days completed, I took a late forfeited place at the South Australian School of Art. I studied, gratefully with David Dallwitz - history of art, Franz Kempf - printmaking, Ian Chandler - painting, Helen MacIntosh, Dora Chapman, Tim Waller, Cec Hardy and Barrie Goddard.

From 1969, while I studied at the art school, I lived across the from the beautiful Adelaide Botanic Park and Gardens, My accommodation was within earshot of the lions and the ‘hoo hoo’ monkeys and the smell of the Weetbix factory. Each day I rode my Malvern Star bicycle, and returned in the evenings to be the live-in baby sitter for a family who became my adopted family from then on.

In the final year of my studies I lived in a share house with friends and worked to stay afloat at house cleaning, waitressing and a very short lived employment in painting garden gnomes. My good friend Anni B.. and I were hastily sacked, being told we were terrible gnome painters.

More cleaning, potato digging, apple and quince picking and every summer, minding Aunty Ivy Barrett’s Post Office at Cygnet River, Kangaroo Island. This included making her apricot jam and minding the chooks who nested in the radio licence boxes. The bicycle journey of 10kms always guaranteed a head wind both ways.

In Adelaide I started teaching for Ruth Tuck and soon had enough saved for a smart BSA bicycle with a wicker basket following the theft of Malvern Star. We - that is myself and Glen, and four others moved into a large and rambling ivy clad mansion on Gilles St, near the Victoria Park racecourse, built for two of the Ayers’ family sisters. Our very welcoming landlord being the Adelaide city council. The council was striving to populate such places due to developers literally putting the wrecking ball in during the night before the new historical listing legislation passed the upper house and became law.

My first studio

Moving from the inner city to Grandpa’s Hill, near Balhannah was wonderful, our way of living began to change to the professionalism of our employment. We adapted to the relentless travel to and fro on the windey roads to achieve it. I made use of my bike and train, Balhannah having a proper station. Then, in my first car - Miriam Minivan bought from a dealer on Port Road run by two fellows wearing platform boots and chest toupées, Glen on his frightening BSA Thunderbolt motorcycle. Our family grew with abandoned dogs, webbed and clawed poultry and a Border Leicester sheep called Thistle. Thistle would travel in the van to go teaching with me, but only to Ruth Tuck’s, not The Flinders University.

With our good friends from student days, and our combined earnings from our art, lecturing, tutoring and miscellaneous other teaching, we managed to purchase the greater part of Kangarilla Hill. It included some road frontaged flat land through which runs Dashwood Creek. Glen and I had already bought half of a tram, converted into being a long caravan in the 50’s. With the additions of a bathroom and another added on room for a baby, this was our home for eight years while we gathered materials for our house. Our first son was born in 1980. It was Aidan’s home for four years.

My second studio

My pictures could be done on the tram table and a horizontal thin space on the wall. We both were given some work at the TAFE in Mount Barker and the principal also gave me the complete old toilet block, a contribution to our new house materials. With kind and strong helpers we demolished it and fetched all of the bricks, timber and roofing steel to our hill. My father, George, helped me with building my tree house studio. It was constructed within three pine trees and several support poles, and clad and lined with off-cut pine planks from the local sawmill. The toilet block roof was bravely put on by Glen and our neighbour Rob. Of a sophisticated design, it included an inside wind-sway-meter as well as a rooftop weather vane shaped like a pig. Teaching endeavours provided a new Enjay etching press and inking rollers etc. The Tree House printmaking and painting became studio for us both. This was my very loved workspace for nearly fourteen years. It was taken by a huge fire started from a passing by tractor on an Easter weekend 1992. Our own fire pumps helped save the house until rescue by the valiant CFS.

After the fire, it was start again. Print makers can be generous. In particular the printmaker and retired teacher Charles Bannon, who let me have his identical Enjay etching press, and all of his rollers and tools. Charles gave me a second small press that I used for demonstration and for a long time it has traveled out on little loan holidays around Australia. A room downstairs in our house became a dedicated print workshop.

The house, constructed with the lower story interior brick ( the toilet block ) and exterior stone ( forty tonnes from a long ago demolished house at Oakbank ). The upper storey is made from Californian redwood. This had been used before as timbered officer hospital huts shipped too late for the Crimean war, but sailed on to be erected on Torrens Island quarantine station. We shared in the demolition of these buildings, days before Aidan was born. All the very large structural timbers, also from America in 1919 were bought from the demolished Royal Adelaide Motor Pavilion at the showgrounds. I spotted the sign (a claim made by a number of people) when Glen and I were on the old red chairlift on our way to the poultry section. We and our neighbours, who shared the spoils, helped with labour. George drove the very long hire truck. After returning from a stay in England with Glen’s father,Leon and Grandmother in 1984, we moved into our home.

Gabriel was born in 1986 and Llewelyn in 1988. Life was busy with our family, our parents, our friends. We traveled again to England to visit Leon and Nandy , and remember the best of times when they came to stay with us. The gardens grew, as did our three boys. The hens laid and the Enjay press in the studio kept turning. Our works in the outside world continued in similar fashion, but with Glen increasingly involved with The Adelaide Festival and the performing arts.

In 1988 we were commissioned by the Adelaide Festival Centre to design and construct a story-telling moving fabric panel installation,' Imagine The Night Sky’ for the ‘Come Out 89’ Youth Arts Festival in the then VizArts gallery in the Playhouse. It was written by Verity Laughton and narrated by Joanne Sarre and constructed at the original ‘Jam Factory’ on Payneham Rd, Stepney. Glen’s grandmother, Primrose, in her 87th year, was living with us. Her help with new born Llewelyn and little Gabriel and Aidan, was a complete blessing to us. I shall always remember her long ago Hampshire New Forest songs she sang for them. My mother cooked our dinners. In this period the Centre was very supportive of visual artists and I held a single person show there and was also in a group project called ‘Rajastani Windows’.

Onwards

A decade of school projects, and then later university projects were always done on the dining table.In our ample living room, board games played, dog tricks perfected and almost every sport played. Outdoors and indoors and sometimes through windows. Quiet times of knitting with my mother and helping boys sew rabbit buttons on school shirts. I ran my painting and drawing classes in the Hahndorf main street, at 'Adele Boag and Mark Wotzke’s First Editions gallery and printing area. I began to travel interstate, holding printmaking workshops and exhibiting in at the Australian Craft and Design shows, as well as in galleries. Later with my classes, I moved to the Hahndorf academy, in a tiny room upstairs. Last one in had to crawl under the table for their place. Here were many happy days working with students, friends and their dogs. Once a cat and a rat called Elizabeth. We enjoyed times of tipping out the water right out of the window onto the lawn.

A Safer way of working for Printmakers

In 2000 An American printmaker, Dan Weldon, came to South Australia to demonstrate a new safer way of etching which had been worked out with Pauline Muir in Adelaide. Often called ‘Solarplate’, or ‘Photopolymer’ etching, a technique explained elsewhere on this site. I was one of the printmakers in this workshop. A little later, after the death of my mother, I traveled with Dan to Amata in the APY Lands to help with the production of several print editions using this technique. The experience of working with the Pitjantjatjara women and men, seeing their pictures being drawn was both a complete revelation and honour for me. The women made a special occasion to acknowledge the birth and death of my mother, Ada Marie Bosworth, who was born at 6 months gestation in 1913, east of these lands. The story of her birth was still in their songs. I was deeply aware my grandmother and her baby had survived because the immense help and care given by those first nation women.

Ayliffe And Ash Art

In 2004 Glen and I made a business partnership and took our work, and later on the glasswork of our son Llewelyn, as a gallery interstate. ArtMelbourne, ArtSydney, and sometimes Canberra and Tasmania. For many years we met with many artists, designers and crafts people, and the art loving public. My printmaking was seen to worthy enough, to invite me to teach yearly at the printmaking workshops of Warringah in Sydney, Megalo in Canberra and the Firestation in Melbourne. These were wonderful experiences for me, working with different printmakers.

With both of us now working at the Academy, the room became too tight and we moved downstairs and refurbished a large room called the Wash House, complete with an 1850’s well. My three classes, for drawing and watercolour painting were a delight for me. Only the kindest and nicest people came, some with their polite dogs, all eight of them (dogs). Mr Noske, the town butcher donated bones.

A New Press

In 2006, an etching press designer and maker died suddenly leaving the parts for a number of presses incomplete and unassembled, with no plans to be found. These were purchased, and with Glen’s CAD knowledge, drawings were made for the missing parts. These were designed for two large presses and then manufactured by Bob Hay in his nearby engineering workshop in Meadows. My trusty Enjay began a new third life in Sydney with a printmaker friend. We held an all day open studio, called ‘Meet The Press’. Friends gathered in the kitchen and living room, Glen on tea, coffee and cakes, and Billy the dog on ball catching tricks. New shiny rollers and I demonstrated intaglio printing to several at a time. “This magnificent etching press” my mother said, “will see you out”.

An important Public commission

Glen had recently worked with the wonderful ‘Arts in Health’ programme at the Flinders Medical Center in a part of a small team of four gathered by the gifted Sally Francis to create its ‘Reconciliation Mural’, located near the main entrance. The next project was the application of it’s guiding principles, developed in Norway to the newly opened oncology ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I was included in this team of four artists, along with Evette Sunset, who also designed the then new courtyard at the FMC, Louise Fennelly, Diwani Oak and Glen.

A New Studio

In our Gabriel’s last years of study in Architecture, he began in 2011, the building of a large double storey studio, one for each of us. He constructed out of mainly reclaimed materials from old outdoors theatre sets. Gabriel worked stoically through wind, rain and heatwaves whilst completing his masters assignments. Glen, who built our house ,was now the labourer. Aidan and Llewelyn helped where they could. Mine is in the top storey. On completion in 2013 he said… “Mummy, this is your new Tree House”. Up there I watch the hills, watch and wait for the seasons… at ground level, Glen’s painting studio, the big table for pressing and cutting paper, the digital printers. The large AGFA Ultra Violet lightbox and perfect paper drawers,( Deep blue) to keep out silverfish, rats and mice,were all kindly given to us by Sue and Chris Morrisey of Henley Graphics.

Away in the World

From 2012 I have traveled once a year, and in recent years with Glen, to Paris and the the Dordogne region of France teaching drawing, painting and art history with the late Peter Kellett in his ‘Walking Matilda’ tours, and now with Kim Petherick. Two Flinders Ranges journeys have been also been done. Recently some international four-way screen connections have been made with these new friends, classes in the isolation age of CV-19.

The End of an Era

Some years ago, in 2016, my students, now dear friends helped me decide I should leave to just work on my pictures. Two of my students became the new teachers. I was given visiting rights. They sent me away with generous provisions, an red electric bicycle and much love.

I thank my students, the volunteers, the board and directors of the Hahndorf Academy and Adele Boag Wotzke of the Wotzke houses, for all the help given to us with such grace and kindness.

On Reflection