Wendy Randall: artist and advocate

17 December 2009
A large hessian wall hanging by Wendy Randall, brought to life with the artist’s trademark embroidery, was a feature of the recent Vincents Annual Group Exhibition in the St James Theatre in Wellington. But unlike the other works on display, it was not for sale.

That’s because the work had been sold a week before the auction. It is, Wendy says, the work she is most proud of. Each of the many embroidered images represents friends, family, places and memories. The elephants, for instance, are about Wendy’s mother, who still lives in Oamaru where Wendy grew up.

“My mother has about 500 elephants in her home – whether they’re earrings, brooches, ornaments or paintings,” she says.

Earlier this year, Wendy had an exhibition at Vincents Art Workshop. At the opening, she presented her mother with her wall hanging of an albatross. “It was inspired by the Otago coast and I knew Mum liked it. She’s very special to me.”

Wendy’s also proud of Journey, a wall hanging selected by curator Rosemary McLeod for an exhibition at Objectspace in Auckland in late 2008. Called No Rules: Rediscovering Embroidery, the exhibition featured the work of 18 artists from around the country.

“I was looking for artists who use embroidery in new and creative ways,” Rosemary says. “Wendy is a great example of an artist working outside the formal, traditional constraints of stitching. I was attracted to Wendy’s work because of the stories it tells about her life, her family and her memories.”

Wendy says she comes from a family of women who did needlecraft. She started doing embroidery on hessian five years ago.

Sugar bags

“I remember my mother and grandmother making things like aprons, peg bags and oven cloths out of sugar bags, and then decorating them with embroidery or scraps of material.”

At school, she learned to do cross stitch on sugar bags, which are a form of hessian. These days, she uses coffee sacks collected from Wellington roasters. “And so I’ve created something new and innovative by using a traditional craft.”

In April this year, Wendy was told that she had cancer. She underwent chemotherapy treatment and then in December, she learned she has a brain tumour.

Glen McDonald, co-ordinator of Vincents Art Workshop, has known Wendy for more than 16 years. She says Wendy is a wonderful advocate for the Wellington creative space. “Even now, as she battles the brain tumour, Wendy is handing out fliers about Vincents to the medical staff, patients and visitors.

“Wendy is a survivor and her resilience amazes me. A part of that resilience is her sense of humour, her concern for the human rights of all people, and the many hours she devotes to her art.”

A place to create and explore

For Wendy, Vincents is sanity. “It’s a safe haven where people understand – a place where I’m free to create and explore. I go there every day and I love it. I like the fact that artists are equally represented on the committee and the fact that not everyone who goes there is disabled.”

Vincents Art Workshop also put the colour back into Wendy’s life – and into her paintings. In 1971, aged 21, she came to Wellington and became an advocate for the Mental Health Consumers Union. Then in the early 1990s, she started spending time at Vincents.

But at first, she created pictures from dark lines of matchstick heads. It was black work for a black world. To work in colour was more than she could bear. “I didn’t use colour at that stage. I was scared of it,” she says of her early work at Vincents Art Workshop. "My colour stuff had been mucked up by abuse in the family and I just stopped doing it.

“One of the tutors kept putting colour paints in front of me and every time she did that, I said, ‘I’ve got to go somewhere else’. One day the tutor said, ‘No, don’t go. We’re going to paint coloured fish and you have to do one before you go’. So I did.”

That was the breakthrough that led to Wendy working fulltime on the colourful textile art for which she is well-known.

“I love it when people buy something I’ve made. It’s not just for the sale. It’s because you see someone valuing what you are doing, valuing something you have made.”