Review Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit by Warren Feeney

This review was published in the Go Arts section of the Christchurch Press on 26 August 2011 – reviewed by Warren Feeney.

How many books are there on the life of an art teacher employed at a secondary school and her influence on the development of New Zealand art?  Curiously none immediately come to mind in a country where, for much of the 20th century, teaching played a predominant role in the lives of most New Zealand artists.

Yvonne Rust. Maverick Spirit proves that the country’s art history is not just a story about the invention of a national identity.  It is also about school teachers, imparting knowledge and inspiring students – training the population to be practitioners, appreciators, collectors and enthusiastic audiences for public art galleries.

Maverick Spirit may be a little romantic as a title, too eagerly pointing the reader’s attention towards a narrative about a free-thinker, yet is is equally a well-researched and readable biography about a complex and enigmatic individual.  Rust was an extraordinary art teacher and an artist whose work in post-war New Zealand (1955-1980) influenced generations of potters, painters and artists.  She seems to have been unable to stop herself from inspiring individuals to make a life-long commitment to the arts, particularly in Northland, the West Coast and Canterbury.

In its documentation and discussion of the South Island craft industry from the late 1950s to 1970s, Maverick Spirit also fills a gap in the history of craft and ceramics in the South Island, addressing recent criticisms of Moyra Elliot’s Cone Ten Down – a history of studio ceramics 1945-1980.  Like Elliot’s publication, Maverick Spirit reveals an untold chapter in the country’s post-war search for a national identity and modernism.

It is an enlightening read.  Novice, aspiring potters searching and digging for clay suitable for ceramics on the West Coast, building a brick kiln in central Christchurch in the late 1950s to fire to 1300 Celsius – is the chimney going to be tall enough to ensure it reaches full heat?  And how about the warm and generous relationship that existed between practitioners of ceramics and fine art in the 1950s and 60s, before art-world political agendas destroyed this cultural dialogue in the 1970s?

Yvonne Rust, teacher, potter and painter, emerges as an influential individual seriously overlooked until now.  She was a complex personality and inspiration to many artists during a period in which the arts were perceived as a marginal activity.  Sjoquist perfectly captures the spirit and frustrations of Rust’s personality, making pertinent and astute references to the lives of her grandparents and parents.  Rust’s father, Gordon, was a school teacher in Northland in the 1920s and 30s, teaching and caring for an impoverished Maori community throughout the Depression.  His example was a crucial influence on Yvonne, influencing her perceptions that a genuine teacher dismissed the boundaries between the classroom and home, making a deeply personal and heartfelt commitment to students and their wellbeing.

Sjoquist’s research is thorough and makes generous use of an unpublished and incomplete autobiography by Rust who is revealed as a Pakeha instinctively drawn towards Maori spirituality and the land.  The link clarifies her determination to advocate for the use of the country’s natural resources to further its spirit of identity, as well as its economic development.  Rust wished to establish a national school of pottery, yet as an incurable romantic she also had a tendency to ignore the paperwork and dismiss any necessary government regulations.

However, she equally appears to have lived her life at just the right moment.  A free-thinker and individual who felt connected to nature and the land, Rust’s ideologies were perfect for the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, a larger than life figure who valued individualism and freedom of expression.

 Maverick Spirit is also an important history because it highlights the role of art education in developing meaningful experiences of the arts for New Zealanders, and reminds us that there was a time when the art teacher and the artist were one and the same creature.  Educationalist, Gordon Tovey emerges as central to this discussion, with his theories of child-centred education a liberating force in New Zealand schools.  Interestingly, this is the second publication in the past three years to acknowledge Tovey’s contribution to the arts and education (see Damian Skinner’s The Artist and the Carver, 2008) and to draw attention to the importance of his agenda in developing contemporary New Zealand art.

Like The Artist and the Carver, Rust’s biography extends our knowledge of the development of the arts in post-war New Zealand, offering an alternative to the mythology of the artist-as-outsider (McCahon, Woollaston, Angus).

Maverick Spirit is a welcome and well overdue publication.

Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit – Fully Illustrated eBook