Shona | Ōpōtiki, Bay of Plenty

“I’m an identical twin, and that taught me that we’re all different no matter what race, what country we’ve come from. Everybody has their own talent, and I learned that as a very small child at primary school.

I loved painting and dancing and singing. I was a very creative wild child, but my twin sister loved singing and she didn’t ever want to do painting or make things, and I realised we were very different. 

One day, calf club day, a teacher came to judge the art work, and mine was way up on the ceiling, because we didn’t have much room in our classroom and we only had green paint because it was the war, and the judge’s name was Sylvia Ashton-Warner. She said to my teacher, she pointed to my painting and said, who did that? My teacher looked at the two of us, my twin sister and I and she couldn’t tell the difference, so she didn’t know which one had done it, and before she answered, Sylvia Ashton-Warner said, and what are you going to do about it? That was an amazing encounter for me, because I realised the teacher couldn’t do anything. She didn’t know the first thing about art and music. She couldn’t play the piano. She didn’t dance, and I thought, I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to make sure that children of the future have a chance to develop their talent, to love art, all art, to love the fact that people are trying, and using their talents so we all reach our full potential. 

The two rules that I cottoned onto when I was six years old were, love art, and be kind. I realised that we have to be kind to each other over our talents. Everybody’s different. Everyone’s talent is different, but we are responsible for our own talent, and that’s our treasure throughout life, and we have to be kind to everybody, because we’re all trying, and nobody’s perfect. Being an identical twin has taught me a great deal. When I came to Ōpōtiki, I was on my pension and I had worked to set up many children’s art houses here in New Zealand, and around the world. I’d been to Australia to set up 54 in Northern Territory, and worked across America. I’d been awarded by the Queen and by Obama, and I’d won a world award in all those things, because I haven’t stopped talking and working with children. 

Every child has got their thing. I remember meeting Andrew, who loved geckos, his mother said he knew of 48 species of gecko, and at 12, Andrew went to Parliament, and changed the New Zealand laws for protecting geckos. He came to the art club, and he could draw sharks like nobody else, dinosaurs, birds, whatever he was into, and he is now a great artist. I’m not surprised. He drew all over himself when he was a little boy. Andrew taught me a great deal about following your obsession, your magnificent passion. About not quitting, and believing in yourself when others tease you. The children at school had turned him upside down and made him draw while they hung onto his feet to see how well he could draw, and he drew beautiful creatures on the footpath pavements at school. He soon gave up school, because all he wanted to do was to study the various animals. His life was different right from the start, but the thing about Andrew was he was small, he was quiet, and he was a very good reader, and he just wasn’t going to stop. Now, this business of not stopping on your talent is very important. I hear many children come in here to this wonderful art house we’re setting up in Ōpōtiki, and say, I would like to see if I could do this or do that, I haven’t done it before, I don’t know if I’m very good, but I keep thinking about it. And, all the children here tend to be great outdoor children, they ride horses, and they swim and they fish, and they just come in without any teaching whatsoever from an adult and they produce wonderful, wonderful work. It’s always colourful. It’s always full of great interest and stories. So, children who haven’t had stories, and haven’t had a chance to deal with nature often come in on the back foot, and I am concerned about that. 

We have to be kind, and make sure we have children’s parks and beautiful gardens. We’re going to build a sculpture park around this art house, and we’ve got the tin and the iron and the wood left over from an old building, but the kids will bring in their own things, and goodness knows what the sculptures will be like, but they will be wonderful. I know they’ll be wonderful because the one thing about it, all around the world, children are in advance of us. They know so much more than we do. They’ve got a long way further to go, and they are the supreme innovators. Give them the material, give them the space and say away you go. The volunteer adults are so pleased to be giving them this space where they can see who they are, what they are. It’s very much like Mark Twain, who influenced me enormously as a writer when he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn took all these risks all over the place, and Tom said to him, why do you do it Huck? And, Huckleberry said, so that I, Huckleberry, know who I am and what I can be. So, being who you really are, not who your best friend is, not who your mother or father is. What do you want to be, that your being-ship is being fed and looked after.

I was born in Porirua Forest under Mt Ruapehu, and it was during the war, and it was tough. I learned how to create something out of nothing and I really feel there’s a message here for all of us. We have to learn to create from where we’re at, use the material we can find, recycle it, make it with our head, hands and heart together, and this is why I have moved around the world to many poor communities. Where there is poverty, there is wonderful creativity, and I am particularly interested in creative education. It is my field of study, and I believe our Māori people in New Zealand are supreme artists. They can sing. They can dance. They can tell stories in a way many of us have lost, and we need to get back there.

Again, we are now one world, one planet, in crisis. We all face the same problem of sustainability and perhaps extinction. We have to work together now, and the best way we can do that is to be kind, and allow everybody to use their own talent to think ahead, and to think for the future. Art, to me, is the foundation tool of education. It is the foundation of everything. Without art, we would have a grey and unrecorded history. Art is the signpost. It’s the messenger. It tells the story of the past. It redirects the future. It interprets the future. Art is the most basic subject children should be given plenty of to study, because through bringing materials together, and sorting out problems via art, it is our best place of learning, and of course, art is immeasurable. It comes from the big blue. It’s not objective. It’s subjective. It’s deeply personal and it illuminates our whole future. Art, to me, is the absolute backbone. It is not a luxury. It is a human necessity.”