COMING FULL CIRCLE
A NEPEAN MEMOIR

Elin Howe

When, in 1984, I started a Visual Arts degree at Nepean College of Advanced Education, I could not, in my wildest dreams have imagined how it would improve my future. It was a gift. It reshaped and enriched my life in countless ways. Primarily though, I cherish it because it led me into work that I loved. I am forever grateful that the vagaries of history allowed me that opportunity. 

Sniffing the cultural breeze in 1983 and sensing a shift, I had slowly begun to realise that I hadn’t blown my chance at an education. After Whitlam’s abolition of tertiary education fees in the 1970s, the phenomenon of the mature-age student was becoming normalised and I saw my chance to get the education I craved. 

Like many women of my generation, I’d abandoned study for marriage mid-course. My full-time diploma studies at the National Art School in the early 1960s ceased at the end of my second year when I married and started a family. My art practice dried up. It began to gradually re-emerge in the 1970s in the form of sewn objects, but I did not think of this activity as an art practice. This was just something I did to stay sane. It wasn’t until the term ‘fibre art’ emerged, signalling feminist strategies to legitimise ‘women’s work’, that I started to glimpse what I was doing. It was the beginning of my politicisation. After that epiphany, I got serious. With my sewn objects comprising my portfolio, I applied to art schools. Impressed by the staff at Nepean, I changed my preferences in its favour after the selection interviews. By the start of 1984, at 39 years of age, to my great delight I found myself in the first cohort of the new Visual Arts degree program at Nepean CAE.

Zeal. Ardour. Passion. That’s what I remember most. From the selection interview to graduation, enthusiasm defined the ethos of the art school. It was contagious. Emanating from the staff was a strong sense of mission – they had come together to offer the bounty of an arts education to the western suburbs of Sydney. Collectively we had something to prove.

In that first year the facilities ranged from adequate to appalling – appalling being the off-campus studio in Gascoigne Street, Kingswood where we spent most of our time. It was a dark factory space with a roller door at the front being the main source of daylight, ergo open all the time. Freezing in winter. Stifling in summer. But somehow it didn’t matter. We threw ourselves into our Foundation Studies. In those early weeks, we spent time learning about the qualities of materials. I remember Noelene Lucas setting us a Bauhaus-like sculpture brief: to create a head from corrugated box cardboard. It had to demonstrate interior volume and stand up on its own without props. I struggled with it. I remember doubting my decision to come to art school during that project. But then they started to set briefs based on ideas and I was off and running. The totem project was the first of these. We were given three weeks to research and create a personal totem in whatever media we liked; and write a page on our rationale. The finished pieces were to be displayed in an on-campus exhibition around the college. This was also my first experience of having to defend my work in a group crit. Schlepping around from work to work listening to my peers was an invaluable learning experience – at once stimulating and scary. I longed to be articulate.

Despite the enthusiasm of the art school staff though, others on campus were not so respectful of our efforts. I remember helping fellow student, Joan Goldsworthy (1935-2012) install an enormous teepee-like structure in the main foyer at Kingswood for a project based on the idea of habitat. Several of us stayed late to help Joan rake white sand neatly around its base before it was to be marked and critiqued the following day. We came in the next morning to discover the sand had been vacuumed up. These acts of sabotage – knowing and unknowing – on the main campus were common. 

Later we moved to the Peachtree Studios where everyone was allocated their own space. Although much further from the main Kingswood campus – on the Nepean River side of Penrith – it was a huge improvement on Gascoigne Street. An enormous warehouse space, it offered more natural light plus plenty of artificial lighting.  As well as everyone having a personal studio space, there were large open areas within and outside the building where larger work could happen or be viewed. 

When I think of Peachtree two recurring physical memories are triggered: on winter mornings we all – students and lecturers – would huddle in the weak sunlight just inside the two big roller doors at the front of the building, clasping our styrofoam coffee cups and stamping the ground to ward off the cold. It took real will power to leave that tepid warmth and go inside to start work. The arctic chill rising from the concrete floor was indescribable. My other memory is of afternoon thunderstorms, as the weather warmed and the jacarandas bloomed. Again, we’d all stand gathered at the roller doors watching the huge, roiling skies massing before they broke. The sense of anticipation was palpable. Then rain and hail would lash the metal building. The noise was spectacular. 

From the get-go I was seduced by art history and theory. It was such an exciting change from my previous experience at the National Art School in the 1960s, which had been dominated by Greenbergian formalism. That class had consisted of a slide show of famous art works in which we discussed only form. The image content was irrelevant. Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling was discussed in purely formal terms. I could see there was more going on, but lacked the courage or will to challenge it. As an 18-year-old, I found art history the epitome of boredom – mostly I skipped it and went to the pub. 

But art history and theory as led by the charismatic duo of Alan Krell and Donal Fitzpatrick at Nepean in the 1980s was the antithesis of this. Content was king. Meaning resided in the imagery and it needed to be addressed. I was rivetted. 

Often Krell and Fitzpatrick delivered lectures in tandem. And sometimes in character – Futurism being a case in point.  As Marinetti and Boccioni – replete with three-piece suits and bowler hats – they stormed onto the stage to give us a totally hammed-up Futurist performance. Those lectures were always huge fun. Theirs was a Marxist social history approach, with to their credit, a smattering of early second wave feminism thrown in. The broader cultural context really mattered to these guys. They had the knack of making history come to life and never missed an opportunity to make it relevant for us, as demonstrated by the following story. One of my classmates, Peter Halir, was a teenager living in Prague when the Soviet invaded in 1968, and as a budding photographer, he had gone out on his bicycle to document the event. On discovering this, Alan Krell assigned a mass lecture slot to Peter, who delivered a first-hand account of the morning after the night-time invasion. From the moment he recalled his mother’s words waking him, “Peter, Peter, get up, the Russians are here, there are tanks in the street”, he guided us through his experience using his black and white images. It was spellbinding.  

There was also a fabulous subject descriptively titled Combined Studies. Its unimaginative name belied its content. Taught by staff rotating weekly from the visual arts and performance schools, this subject traced the development of these art forms through the modern period (post Industrial Revolution through to the present day). Students from both these schools would gather in the main theatre on a Friday morning for a mass lecture on the parallel developments in these areas. For me it was a revelation. It gave me a basic historical framework on which to hang information, and I still regard it as one of the most valuable parts of my education.

After our first year, electives in art history became available and one semester I chose Australian Art taught by Garry Darby, because, excitingly, one of the twelve sessions was devoted to Australian women artists! It was an eye-opener in so many ways, not the least of which was the dearth of teaching resource material available on women – a smattering of black and white slides. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I found it fascinating. I was rapidly becoming politicised around gender and began to recognise the invisible mesh which constrained my life within the academy, at work and at home. At college especially, I was very conflicted because I recognised the value of the education I was getting. I loved learning, and felt a huge sense of gratitude to my teachers. At the same time I was starting to discern the double standards applied in the studio. Older married women, and there were a few of us, were often subtly cast as hobbyists. I was making huge sacrifices to acquire this education – working nights and weekends to finance my studies; juggling parenting and home life; and constantly battling exhaustion – so being perceived as ‘not serious’ was pretty galling.

The staffing at the art school itself reflected the sexism of the wider world – male lecturers far outnumbered their female colleagues. As I recall, at the outset there were only three women on staff – Jacqueline Clayton in ceramics; Paddy Robinson in glass; and Noelene Lucas in sculpture. Difficulties arose for me in the studio once the set briefs morphed into self-direction. Having spent 20 years raising children, the images I was making often revolved around motherhood. My work was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the all-male lecturers in the painting studio, but it wasn’t until one of them offered me a well-meaning, but sexist piece of advice that the scales fell from my eyes. He told me that I needed to get out of the house and into the real world, “this stuff is too saccharine,” he said. “You need to get out into the real world. Paint bridges”. That was the turning point which pushed me in the direction of art history and theory. I was apoplectic with rage and frustrated because I didn’t have the language to defend myself. This incident resonated with another in my recent past. Both of my parents were dentists and when I’d flagged studying again as a mature-age student, my father, who had never approved of my earlier art school foray, offered an equally well-meaning but sexist piece of advice: “with your artistic ability, you could go to the top in dental ceramics”. Ironically that narrow view of my options furnished me with subject matter for my final body of work for college, exhibited in the 1986 graduating exhibition. 

Art history and theory became my obsession. I wrote my third-year research paper on artist Ethel Carrick Fox – wife of Emmanuel Phillips Fox whose early death had caused her to put her own practice on the back burner and devote the rest of her life to ensuring his name had a place in Australian art history. I identified strongly and empathised with her story – it was an intense time in my life. Things were going awry at home too as I railed against expectations. 

In those days the degree option of Art History and Criticism was not available at Nepean. Without really thinking about it, I abandoned my art practice. Being articulate was my goal. I had decided I wanted to go to the University of Sydney and do Honours in art history at the Power Institute. This decision was the tipping point in my marriage. I handed in my research paper at Nepean and started looking for a flat. 

Sydney University was another steep learning curve. I arrived just as post-modernism was starting to hit the academy – a mighty battle was in progress between the connoisseurs and the post-modernists with bewildered students caught in the crossfire – but that’s another story. Over the ensuing years I studied and cobbled together a living teaching art history and theory as a sessional or short-term contract lecturer in both the university and TAFE sectors. Precarious, but I loved it. Then in my early sixties I landed a dream job – a full-time gig as art history co-ordinator at the Sydney Gallery School, Meadowbank TAFE. It changed my life. For the first time since I had started teaching, I was financially secure. I loved working at Meadowbank – it was a vibrant art school with a staff of committed passionate teachers. Being part of that was a privilege. My reluctant retirement from that job was precipitated by another restructuring (read defunding) of the TAFE system. After seven great years, I knew I’d had the best of it when I left Meadowbank in 2013. I could see the tsunami of change coming and it didn’t look good. I was 69. It was time to go. 

I settled into a slower pace of life. One day, tidying boxes on the top shelf of the study cupboard, I discovered an unfinished patchwork quilt I had started in the 1970s. The dated fabrics, all remnants from past sewing projects, catapulted me back to a previous life, a land far, far away. I decided to finish it. As I stitched, I became conscious of wanting to incorporate its history by embroidering descriptive text pieces onto its surface. Before long it was becoming a full-blown piece of ‘fibre art’. It was the half-open door which led back to my current textile practice.

That woman who made sewn objects to stay sane is back. She has come full circle. And like that young woman embarking on her Visual Arts degree who could never have imagined she’d get such a buzz out of a lifetime of teaching art history, this old woman could never have imagined she’d get such a buzz out of stitching again. But she does.