Seeds of Change

Anne was cruising along a Waiheke Island gravel road on a 50cc Vespa when the first
disaster struck. 

It was 2006 and life was good. During the week, she’d live in Auckland and work at Unitec, and
on the weekends she and husband Geoff would head for their house at Onetangi Beach on Waiheke. She was on the way to visit a friend, when she steered her vespa onto the side of the road to let
a car pass. Her speed was too much for the gravel, she skidded, flew over the handlebars and hit
the road, sustaining a broken wrist and concussion.

Unfortunately for Anne, her concussion was not taken seriously enough — she was told to just rest
if a headache came on. “The thing with concussion is you feel kind of wonky but you seem ok; it’s
why the rugby players say ‘I’m fine’ and keep playing rugby.” She took time off work to heal the wrist, but her brain wasn’t healing. It felt full of cotton wool with persistent headaches. When she returned to work, the brain fog and pain never left and her dream job as director of institute relations was slowly becoming unfeasible.

“I absolutely loved that job and I loved my colleagues. But I was still struggling with the effects
of my head injury after two years. Everything was hard. I also felt sad that I’d never be the person
I was.” Anne reluctantly downsized her job to director of a music therapy centre. 

Then disaster struck a second time — another head injury. “The one thing they say about head injuries, is that you mustn’t get another one,” says Anne. She was helping her husband hang a
heavy glass door, when she fell and cracked her head impossibly hard on the door frame. The
pain was not only in her head but now in her neck as well. That’s when the real problems started.

“I’d have an hour-long meeting with someone but if I met them a week later, I’d have no recollection
of the meeting or who that person was. It was a horrible feeling and that happened to me all the
time. Things got harder and harder, sometimes five days out of seven I was in pain.” 

The situation was so bad Anne had suicidal thoughts — it was the only way that she could see
to end the pain. 

She resigned from her job in 2011, thinking her life was over, when a friend visiting from Wellington, appalled at how bad Anne’s pain had become, took her to hospital. At last her condition was taken seriously. She was diagnosed as having neuropathic pain and the process of finding a drug that could help her began. She also enrolled in a pain management programme, which taught her how
to live with her pain.

For Anne, going from earning a high income to zero overnight — without qualifying for ACC
payments because they put the pain down to “pre-existing migraines” — was devastating. “My job was a huge loss — who was I now? I also had pain all the time and no work to distract from it...
So I started making art.”‍

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Andean adventure

Though it wasn’t clear at the time, this was a massive opportunity for Anne to finally live her alternative path. 

Anne had always been creative as a child. As a young adult she had studied science and journalism and spent 10 years travelling and working as a copyeditor overseas, but a longing to make art was always in the background. Anne was visiting Peru in the 1990s when she signed up for a ceramics night class. She was good — so much so that her tutor told her she should go to art school. So Anne, never someone to do anything by halves, packed everything up and emigrated to Peru, enrolling
in the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in Cusco, in an intense seven-year course that introduced students to every art form, from sculpture to paint to printmaking.

Cusco was another world for Anne. Not only did Peru have cholera but it had the Maoist guerilla rebels, Shining Path, terrorising the country, so foreign tourists were scarce. She remembers
seeing giant, flaming Shining Path acronyms, made from stacks of oil-filled cans, blazing on
the hills above Cusco. 

Without knowing a soul beforehand, she lived with a local family and learnt to speak Spanish:
“My English actually got rusty.” She loved everything — the cobbled streets, the Andean culture,
the flavours and colours, her studies. But her Peruvian life wasn’t to be. 

After one year she fell and broke her arm (which was masterfully fixed by a local shaman, but
that’s a different story) and while recovering, she was violently mugged. It was time to go: armed
with her wood-cuts from her student art exhibition, she headed back to London. And it was there
she met architect Geoff, who became her husband.

Anne and Geoff went to live in Italy, where Anne would teach English, and draw landscapes and people. But New Zealand called and soon they were back home with Anne climbing the communications career ladder, over the years subediting for the Listener, the Herald and others, making television documentaries and finally joining West Auckland’s huge polytech, Unitec. She
left art in her past — or so it seemed until the accidents.‍

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An artistic distraction

As a distraction from the intense pain from her injuries, Anne started experimenting with collage
art using her collection of quilting fabrics. After about a year, Anne and Geoff staged an exhibition, transforming their apartment in Auckland’s 1930s Dilworth building into a gallery. They removed all the furniture and hung about 40 works all over the white walls. She invited everyone she could think of and 100 people turned up. It sold out in about an hour. 

“It was one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life — it just went off! I was in a taxi with
my niece that night and I remember saying to her, I’ve always wanted to be an artist, and you know, maybe I am.”

Since then Anne has held three private exhibitions, and has been part of more than half a dozen
art shows, selling virtually everything she makes.

Her method is her own, a collage technique using paper inlay and fabric. The tools she uses are scalpel, scissors and tweezers, the work painstakingly cut and assembled. Her fabric archive is
huge, more than a hundred coat hangers packed along the wall of her studio, each one holding
an eye-watering mashup of fabrics. “Sometimes I look at literally every scrap of fabric in my studio
to find the right piece. I’m trying to put pattern on pattern and see how far I can push it while still making the image recognisable.” 

It’s mostly cotton but there’s a large collection of men’s ties, some with chunks already cut out,
all recycled from secondhand shops and friends. “Ties are beautiful to use — they’re traditionally
the only statement on a man’s outfit, so they have a fabric that’s really rich and lustrous.”

The resulting artwork however, has an effect that’s minimalist, and while some works are refined
and muted, others have pops of vibrancy. 

Her artwork is often of birds because she’s a “conservationist with a degree in zoology and botany”. Kororā/little blue penguin, tūī, shag, gannet, wrybill, duck and kōtare/kingfisher are just some of
the artworks on her studio wall right now.

One of her collections matches the dates of bird extinctions with inventions, for example, the extinction of Dieffenbach’s Rail and the introduction of postage stamps. “I like the idea of presenting the birds as art but also, like an ornithologist would, I always use the scientific name of the bird,
say something about its behaviour or biology on the work, and then their threatened status. I’ve combined art with conservation. I think I had a crazy idea that someone would buy the art, love it, read it and think, ‘ooh, I’d better join Forest & Bird’.

“I remember saying we’ll just plant
some lovely trees, not much garden,
but my friends all laughed because
they knew I’d go crazy.”‍

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Rural life & music

After leaving Auckland, the couple realised that they love country living, and they now live in
Apata, near Ōmokoroa. It’s hard to believe that just six years ago Anne’s lush, bloom-filled garden
in Apata was a kikuyu-filled paddock dotted with some giant poplars and willows. It’s now
a secret garden of native and exotic shrubs, fruit trees, drifts of maroon-coloured hellebores,
400 hydrangeas, and paths through avenues of purple, pinks, white and red flower beds.
There’s a picking garden of scabiosa and cosmos, and in the summer spectacular dahlias. 

Anne sells blooms at Tauranga’s Floral Hub market (see page 45) and the garden features in the Garden & Art Festival, “I remember saying we’ll just plant some lovely trees, not much garden,
but my friends all laughed because they knew I’d go crazy.”

Anne’s garden also serves another purpose. “Sometimes when the pain becomes too much,
I just get out and garden — it’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”

Her 602m timber house has an artist vibe — Gary Nash glass sculptures glow on tables, philodendrons perch in luminous coloured glass pots and bowls, a Peruvian blanket on a red
couch. Her vast collection of Hanmer pottery is scattered throughout the house — a jug here,
a plant pot and mug there, 42 Hanmer ball vases on a shelf. Crown Lynn china spreads across bookcases and walls. Oil paintings by Julian Hooper and Anne’s own woodcut prints she made
in Peru hang in the lounge. 

Outside, off the verandah, a dozen plump red goldfish glow in a circular farm trough, surrounded
by vireyas, topiaried port wine magnolias and pittosporums. Birdsong rings from all sides, and
you can see the Tauranga Harbour in one direction and the jagged Kaimai Ranges in another.

In the corner of her art studio is a keyboard and guitar. Anne’s family was always musical
and although she says she’s had a lifelong dream to play bass guitar in a punk band, she’s
found surprising happiness as one half of a folk music duo after joining the Katikati Folk Club.
She and Ashley Smith performed monthly at the Bowentown Cafe for two years, and play at
various local events.

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A full life 

A garden, music, art. Anne has turned the accidents into an opportunity to live a life that otherwise would never have been.

“I’m happy now. I didn’t want to spend my life fighting ACC or looking for some magic bullet to
get rid of this condition. I moved on. The doctors tried a lot of drugs and finally found something
that reduces the pain — so my condition is under control and I will be on those drugs for life. But it’s
a good life.”‍

annebailey.co.nz
@annebaileyartist

Story by Skye Wishart
Photography by Katie Cox