Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2024 Photo: Alex Lovell-Smith
It’s not possible to consider modern textiles in Aotearoa New Zealand without encountering the advocacy, research, exhibition-making and art of weaver Margery Blackman.
Current exhibition Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life reflects on the many different aspects of Blackman’s career. Curated by Elle Loui August and Jane Groufsky, it features woven tapestries that Blackman made over three decades, and brings many of her larger works and public commissions together for the first time. These are joined by material from her archive, personal collections and the collection of Tūhura Otago Museum.
The exhibition runs at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until 13 October.
Elle Loui August joins Blackman’s daughter, Anna Blackman in conversation with Culture 101’s Mark Amery.
Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2024 Photo: Alex Lovell-Smith
Anna Blackman is Head Curator - Archives at Hocken Collections University of Otago. Her background in archives is one, she admits, is rather apt for someone dealing with the rich material legacy of two artist-scholar parents.
Margery Blackman, c.1977 Photo: John Daley
Anna’s father Gary Blackman, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 92, was one of the country’s pioneering modern photographers and an Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Otago. Blackman describes the house in which she grew up in, designed for the family by friend Ted McCoy, as “a work of art-in-progress”. It was a studio to both her parents, a family home and a meeting place for artists and textiles specialists from around the mōtu and around the world.
Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2024 Photo: Alex Lovell-Smith
Margery Blackman was born in Dunedin in 1930. She began weaving while living in Edinburgh with husband Gary in the early 1960s. By the middle of that decade they had returned home and Margery became active as an advocate and skilled practitioner of spinning, weaving and dying. By 1965 she and Gary had organised the first national exhibition of contemporary handweaving with the support of a local artist-run organisation, the Visual Arts Association.
Working with many local arts organisations, notably Tūhura Otago Museum, Margery began researching, writing, curating exhibitions, teaching public workshops and advocating for craft and cultural heritage.
Travelling extensively over the decades, Blackman was responsible for connecting Aotearoa to textile practice and history internationally, as well as paying increasing attention to Māori textile history and technique.
A skilled colourist working with fibre, Elle Loui August notes that in her own work Blackman developed a distinctive abstract language, unique in the studio craft movement of Aotearoa during the late 1960 through to 1980s.
Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2024 Photo: Alex Lovell-Smith
“My work,” Margery once wrote, “exploits the reflective and textural qualities of fibre and yarn and their ability to absorb colour. The appeal of weaving as a process is the structural control which builds the image as an integral part of the fabric. My designs are concerned with this fundamental structure.”
Though Margery Blackman began curating exhibitions and working with the collection of Tūhura Otago Museum from the late 1960s, it was between 1988 and 1999 as an Honorary Curator of Ethnographic Textiles that the curators note she made an especially enduring contribution with exhibitions, which included Ngā Taonga no ngā Wahine: Treasures of Māori Women (1989) and Emperors Court to Village Festival: Chinese costume and textiles from the collection of Otago Museum (1998).
Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2024 Photo: Alex Lovell-Smith
