The Workshop: A Memoir

Biting the hand

One more likely naming story, one that relates to the Ngautaringa spelling – ngau, to bite; ringa, hand – is that it was the place where a precocious child bit the hand of a Māori rangatira (chief); an act that violated his mana (prestige) and would have put the child’s fate in question.[1]

Recently I saw an imagined depiction of the child in a painting by New Zealand artist Tony Fomison. The painting was titled Ngauteringaringa. Fomison’s painting depicted the child with his tongue poking out and his thumb against the side of his head in that classic childhood ‘stuff you’ gesture. We don’t know what happened to the child. But we do know about the later offences commited in the bay; the reclamation, the toxic discharges from both the Navy’s industrial activities and the rubbish dump that continues to leak, poisoning the remaining mangrove estuary.

Ngataringa Bay is where Nat and I and our family lived for forty-seven years. Before the reclamation, the sea would have lapped at our property’s boundary. My workshop would have been 20 metres from the high-tide mark. I built it. It was a long, thin, gabled building measuring 10 x 4 metres. It answered to more than one vernacular architectural source: its heavy barge boards resembled the amo [2] of the wharenui, the Māori meeting house; the sliding barn-style doors and corrugated-iron exterior, the New Zealand rural farm shed; and it had a touch of Japanese with its post-and-beam construction and narrow verandah (engawa). I attached my jeweller’s bench to its central poles.


Serendipity

I had come to this workshop-based method of working in the 1970s. As a practice it took its permission from the international contemporary craft movement, but in the early 1970s in New Zealand it was also informed by a hippy ethos, the ethos of self-sufficiency – making a living from one’s hands was an asset to this lifestyle. That ethos also promoted self-teaching. Besides, in the 1970s training institutions didn’t exist in New Zealand and there were very few workshops I could have approached to learn contemporary jewellery making. And as I had no long-term commitment to the craft, I wouldn’t have chosen either of those options anyway.

So, with a little knowledge I had garnered from an old school-friend about jewellery making, I gathered tools and skills around me, making myself up as a craftsman jeweller, whatever those times said that should look like. I was also harbouring an artistic instinct that I knew had to go somewhere; that sense of necessity was in me, I knew its weight, but I never thought jewellery had big enough shoulders.

The beginning of that understanding didn’t come until ten years later, when goldsmith and professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Hermann Jünger, visited New Zealand in 1982. At a workshop he held in Nelson, organised by the Goethe-Institut and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, I heard the language of making. It was being used by Jünger to describe making jewellery, but it had a resonance that I understood could be applied to any art making – a call and response between the mind and the hands. Jünger’s own work, and the images he showed of his students’ work, took me over a line of understanding – jewellery’s shoulders were big enough.

Contemporary craft was at a stage of development in the later part of the twentieth century that saw it making forays into contemporary art practice. It was trying to shed much of its traditional artisan history and utility as a decorative art so it might gain notice as a contemporary art practice. At the end of the 1980s I read a text by British craft writer Peter Dormer, in which he said: The irrelevance of craft work has caused it to mutate from being the livelihood of working-class artisans into an activity of self-expression for middle-class aesthetes and quasi artists. [3]

That’s me, I thought, as I prepared to leave for my first exhibition with Paul Derrez at Galerie Ra in Amsterdam. In the early 1970s I had chosen craft over art because in the hippy era, when I started, there was some vague suggestion that craft was a useful activity that could be practised as necessity, a craftsman making things that people need to live with. But by the end of the 1980s I had already altered my making practice to one more like that of Dormer’s ‘quasi artists’. The exhibition with Galerie Ra happened because I was in an exhibition in Australia and my exhibition piece was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia. It was seen there by Galerie Ra’s director Paul Derrez during a visit in 1988. Jünger, and now Derrez; serendipity was already an active partner in my workshop practice.

The exhibition in Amsterdam was called Share of Sky, named for an image I had made of my forefingers and thumbs creating a small four-pointed star at my fingertips, pointed at the sky over Ngataringa Bay. My share of sky.

I made many four-pointed star works for that exhibition. In the years after, the four-pointed star became a signature – it recurred in diverse forms and different materials. I began to collect images of four-pointed stars.


A layered life

But back to the workshop’s beginnings in the bay. Before the settlement had a rubbish dump, the early residents of our house dealt with their refuse in the only way available – items no longer of any use were buried on the property where they lived. The excavation for the workshop foundations uncovered layers of rubbish from the earlier occupants. Archaeologists call these middens. Most of the midden I dug into consisted of the discarded material from the early-twentieth-century occupants. It was rubbish buried by the people that built and lived in the house my family and I now lived in.

One layer yielded items of an even earlier occupant of the property: a Māori stone adze, and a piece of obsidian that would have been used for making cutting blades. Both were discarded as rubbish because the introduction of iron by European colonists had made them redundant.

Over the years we lived there we left our own layers on the land. Newer middens of occupation. I buried the refuse from my own workshop, the off-cuts of stone and shell and the failed pieces. In doing so I added another layer to the land’s archaeological record – a twentieth-century New Zealand contemporary jeweller worked here.

Once when I was digging the garden outside the workshop, I dug into a midden I had buried ten years earlier. From it I unearthed the remnant off-cut of an old work: a pearl-shell star shape cut from the centre of Soft Star. Discarded at the time, it was now transformed by its time underground – the edges had softened and coloured. I made a new four-pointed star work.

The household compost bin was another kind of midden. One day when the bin was broken up, dozens of chicken-wing bones tumbled out with the friable composted material. Still intact but stained brown from being in the earth. I made a beaded necklace of bird bones.

Inside, the workshop was accumulating its own layers. The empty benchtops had become layered with my work sketches. My system of sketching three-dimensionally, sometimes in a soft material like wood, but also sometimes in stone, produces many small objects: sometimes gestural and only vaguely suggestive of a finished piece, sometimes almost completely realised.

As a friend once told me, sometimes we make things to see what they look like after they have been made. An inefficient process, but it was the way I worked.

The sketches accumulate. Taking up bench space, one idea blending with another, their boundaries confused by the confined space. Eventually the constraints of space mean these layers of experimentation are swept off to make more room. Some into a bucket and then outside to become another midden, some put in a box, labelled with the name of the piece and put in a drawer and closed like one would a sketch book of working drawings.

The music producer Rick Rubin, writing on creativity, produced a list of aphorisms called thoughts not conducive to work. Amongst them he writes never finishing projects.[4]

My workshop is littered with the ‘never finished’. There are many reasons for the work to stop. Material failure looms largest, but sometimes it’s a failure of belonging. I make most of my pieces as editions. Not large editions, usually fewer than ten, sometimes only one or two. This means each piece has a reference to other works in the edition. They are never the same, variations inherent in the handmaking process cause differences, though usually it’s the variations in the colour and nature of the material that create difference. But they all must answer to the same criteria in a lineup. They can be different, but not better or worse.

To ensure consistency over an edition I make a template for each work. Sometimes the templates grow on the trees outside my workshop. For two works I just picked their leaves and drew around them.

The workshop makes dust. Layers of it. Dust from wood, metal, stone, plastic, and many more materials. I collected the dust from each material, for no reason, until, in 2011, I made a record of the materials (over sixty) I had used to make jewellery by mixing the dust of each with a binder and painting it onto a small rectangle of wood. Then arranged them on the wall in a way that is reminiscent of a sample rack of laminates in a hardware store. But also – because of the hole they were suspended from – possibly pendants.


Tools

The materials and the sketches share space with the basic tech needed to shape them. The traditional cut-away jeweller’s bench with its hammers and hand tools. A diamond saw and disc laps for hard stones. A drill press and bandsaw for softer materials like plastic and wood. Simple machines for simple tasks like cutting, drilling, and grinding. The fundamental tasks needed for making, whether by hand or machine.

Another of Rick Rubin’s list of thoughts not conducive to work is the belief that your work ‘will require specific tools or equipment to be done.’ I agree; technology may be conducive to creativity, but it is not at the heart of it. I find whenever I put a technology before an idea the idea usually suffers.

I accept the workshop’s authority. When I step inside the workshop it tells me what I can make – a restriction I have come to understand, respect, and answer to. ‘This is what you can make’ isn’t a nostalgia for simple technology. It’s not an antidote to the smartphone that is a constant in my pocket. It’s more about my understanding of the nature of transformation and wanting to stay connected to it.

The act of transformation that can take place with very simple actions. A fundamental action like drilling a hole (as in the panels in Dust) is one of the earliest technical skills we developed. That simple action, by creating a point of suspension, can make any material a piece of jewellery. That technique is probably why jewellery is so prominent in our early material culture.

I’ve never believed the workshop way of working is in any sense an aesthetic of opposition to the industrial. I often try for an industrial look. The workshop can achieve that look. The workshop can achieve many looks. The workshop is very versatile. To be honest, it is good at faking. What the workshop could do, I could do. What I could do is what the workshop could do.


Finding the place

By the accident of distance from everywhere else, Aotearoa was the last sizeable land mass to be discovered by humans – 900 years ago by Polynesian seafarers, 250 years ago by Europeans. So, the gap between the stone-tool culture of the Polynesians and the arrival of the iron-tool culture of the Europeans is very narrow.

I had a childhood interest in the pre-European manufacture of stone tools by Māori. A childhood home was in an area where such tools were manufactured. The stone had been moved from quarry sites in the hills to a sandspit where the flaking and final shaping was done. Two hundred and fifty years was not enough time to bury the evidence of that activity very far below the surface. This was most evidenced by areas of stone flakes – a sign that someone had been on this spot making a tool. Chipping the stone (knapping) by striking it with a hammer stone is how tools had been made for millions of years, but these ones were made only a few hundred years ago. The stone adze I excavated from only a few feet under my new workshop floor thirty years ago was a poorly finished tool, but any stone held in a hand of the right size and shape could become a tool. The transformation required can be very minimal.

From that experience I learned a fundamental lesson about the transformation of a material from one notion to another – from a material without a function to one with a function. This interest in the minimal transformation of a material has always followed me through my making. Our past speaks of tools and adornment. I once made a necklace from the flakes produced by knapping.
 
 
Finding the face

Another transformation that happens in the workshop begins with the found. The identification of an archetypal resonance in a found object can be the beginning of transformation.

I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made. [5]

I look for this in the found object. Sometimes the transformation has already been started on the object by the action of nature, wind, and water, by insects and waves, the action of oxidation, processes that transform and shape materials before they even reach me. But chosen by me because I recognise a form that feels familiar, usually not associated with the contemporary iteration I find, but an archetypal form – a sign from the past.

The object I find may have a banal contemporary association, but it also has an older, distant echo. Like the way the surrealists drew attention to the poetry in found objects – rocks, shells, bones, and wood. Of course, they weren’t the first to see it, to find the face, but they did name it – objet trouvé.
 

Finding the space

The jeweller’s bench peg is my sounding block, a mute receiver of my thoughts while at work. The bench is a place to discover how clever you are, how useless you are. Not a place for arguments about modes of production, the viability of hands versus other technology, but a place to think, a place to learn about myself. I’ve looked at these blocks for so long now that I’ve developed an affection for them – this has extended to keeping them after they are worn out.

Their deformation records a history of thousands of things made. The marks of subtraction, the filing, the burning, the drill holes, are testament to construction. The wear on the bench peg is not only a record of time spent on making but also of time spent thinking at the bench.
As maker, that thinking involves creating your own narrative about the role you have chosen for yourself. For me, that has been about building a narrative around my own concept of ‘usefulness’.

The capacity of an object to generate a story about its usefulness is important to me. I’m not suggesting usefulness is only about an object’s function. For me it’s a sensibility belonging to how it is ‘used’ in a broad social and cultural context. I recall that writer and teacher Pravu Mazumdar once observed that jewellery has an anthropological reflection. To me, sometimes that reflection is dazzling. I feel like an animal caught in the headlights of a car on the road of our material history.

At the bench peg, I hear others’ voices. They never asked for the job, but I let my colleagues, alive and dead, sit on my shoulder and whisper in my ear. Hermann Jünger, Otto Künzli, Onno Boekhoudt, Dorothea Prühl, Kobi Bosshard, Alan Preston, and others. My gratitude for what they have brought to my art form provides a reference point. I want to look them in the eye. They are part of the scaffold I surround my work with, made up of metaphors, references, quotes, and influences, all contributing to the permission a piece needs to leave the workshop.

I might collect bench pegs, but I don’t romanticise the workshop – it’s a place of work. After fifty years, it’s still the best place to make my work. The workshop is a tool: on a good day, it lets me make the things I think of; on a bad day, it takes more than it gives.

In his book McCahon Country, Justin Paton writes: Anything is possible in art. But only a few things feel necessary. [6]

Most things are possible in the workshop, but its other great virtue is that, given time, it is the place where I can resolve whether what I’m making feels necessary – a place where I can consider my jewellery’s usefulness.

There is another guiding principle I apply to my work. I call it – ‘what looks right’. When a piece has a sense of economy, an aptness, perhaps some grace, I say, ‘it looks right’. I have a rubber stamp of a slogan I culled from an old cosmetic advertisement, ‘beauty is your duty’. We are loath to apply such imperatives today, but let’s agree that when something is true to itself, we can call it beautiful. I feel that call.

We left the Ngataringa Bay house in 2019. The workshop was emptied of all the signs of my time there as a jeweller. Empty of all its layers, including the benches. The only sign I had been there was this trail worn on the floor, the record of my daily trip from the workshop door to my bench.

 

Notes:
1. David Simmons, Maori Auckland. Bush Press, 1987, p. 73.
2. The amo are two upright supports or side posts at the front of the wharenui representing legs. All translations of te reo Māori (Māori language) words in the footnotes are based on entries in Te Aka Māori Dictionary, https://maoridictionary.co.nz.
3. Peter Dormer, ‘Vermeer’s Lace Maker.’ Design after Modernism: Beyond the Object, edited by John Thackara. Thames & Hudson, 1988, p. 135.
4. Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Canongate, 2023, p. 139.
5. W. B. Yeats, ‘Before the World Was Made.’ Collected Poems of W. B Yeats. MacMillan, 1933, p. 308.
6. Justin Paton, McCahon Country. Penguin Random House, 2019, p. 6.
 

About the author

Warwick Freeman (b.1953, Nelson) began making jewellery in 1972. As a prominent member of Auckland jewellery co-operative, Fingers, he was at the forefront of a rethinking of New Zealand contemporary jewellery practice that began in the 1980s. He has exhibited internationally since that time. In 2002 he was made a Laureate by the Francoise van den Bosch Foundation based at the Stedelijk Museum. In the same year Freeman received a laureate award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. In 2014, Freeman co-curated the exhibition Wunderrūma, with jeweller, Karl Fritsch. Wunderrūma was presented at Galerie Handwerk in Munich, and on its return to New Zealand at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. His works are held in public and private collections in New Zealand and internationally including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the V&A, London, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, LACMA, Los Angeles, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.


Warwick Freeman, 2019, photograph by Sam Hartnett, courtesy of Objectspace.