User:Theresa Sjoquist/Yvonne Rust, QSM

Yvonne Rust, QSM Yvonne Rust, QSM, was a New Zealand pioneering potter, inspirational arts teacher and in later years, a prolific painter. Born on 19 November 1922 at Awarua in Northland, New Zealand, Rust was the only daughter of Gordon and Annie Rust (nee Buckhurst). Gordon was a third generation school teacher among Maori, and his wife Annie was an accomplished artist who had been a tutor at Canterbury College of Art (today, Ilam School of Fine Arts attached to Canterbury University)from 1917 to 1921. Gordon was a Native Schools headmaster which meant that Yvonne’s early years were spent amongst Maori. In 1928, when Yvonne was six, Gordon was transferred by the Education Dept to Te Hapua, New Zealand’s northernmost community. There, Yvonne found herself the only white child.

Because Gordon was the only representative of the state in Te Hapua, since he was the headmaster of a state run Native School, he wore many hats – among them: doctor, dentist, postmaster, translator, mediator and payer-out of relief payments during the Great Depression. This meant that he worked very long hours, and his wife worked just as many hours. She taught Primer Nought, a class designed to introduce English to Maori before they started their syllabus in the English language.

With both parents working long hours, young Yvonne spent a great deal of time with young Maori. Young Maori of the 1920s spent their time out in the natural environment, riding horses, digging shellfish, eeling, climbing trees, clambering up hills, fishing. This association with Maori developed in Yvonne a perception of the natural world which was a peculiarly Maori perception, and that was that the natural world was a living body, imbued with spirit.

This perception remained with Yvonne for the duration of her life and it informed much of her artistic work as she moved into the arts during the early 1940s.

Yvonne received a good “English” education also from her very cultured mother, so she grew up with an unusual concept of life and society. Gordon was again transferred by the Education Dept in 1937 to Parawera in the Waikato, not far from the famous Maori war site of Orakau Valley. From Parawera Yvonne travelled daily to Te Awamutu for her secondary school education and in 1940, moved to Christchurch to earn her Diploma in Fine Arts, which was then not available in Auckland.

She graduated in 1946 and began teaching art in secondary schools just as art was being introduced to the general curriculum for the first time. Until this point, art had not featured at all in New Zealand general education, and its introduction at the behest of C E Beeby, and carried out under the expert aegis of Gordon Tovey, revolutionized education in New Zealand schools. In 1946 when Yvonne began teaching, teachers gained their skills with 100 hours of observation of an incumbent teacher. The day Yvonne began her 100 hours, the incumbent became ill and was transferred to hospital, never returning, so Yvonne became the tutor by default. This suited her personality since she was a free thinker, but it also followed to some degree in her father’s and grandfather’s and great grandmother’s footsteps, all untrained teachers, all with exceptional teaching abilities.

As part of the education revolution, refresher courses were periodically run, in particular for arts teachers who were often isolated amongst their academic peers, and in 1949 at one of these refresher courses, Yvonne met Robert Nettleton Field who was demonstrating the art of throwing a pot on a wheel. Yvonne was mesmerized and there began her fascination with clay and pottery.

In 1956 she set up the first National Pottery school which attracted 80 students and included tutors, Mirek Smisek, Patricia Perrin,  Marion Mauger and Carl Vendelbosch. In 1965 she hosted Japanese Master Potter Shoji Hamada as part of the Christchurch Arts Festival.

She was crucial in setting up the Springfield Road Craft Centre with Jim Nelson in 1957, and in 1959, she set up her own private pottery school and studio, The School of Design, on Colombo Street in Christchurch. There she helped many arts students get their Preliminaries for Art School and taught many more the craft of pottery. She built the first oil-fired kiln in Christchurch.

In 1966 she moved to Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island and introduced pottery as a new income stream. Up until that point there was not a single potter on the entire West Coast, despite there being very good deposits of clay. By the time she left six years later, there were more than 200, many of them quite young since she had introduced pottery initially through her art students at Greymouth High School where she was the arts tutor. Later she set up night classes which became very popular.

Her great gift as a teacher was to relate to each student individually, so that each felt that they had her undivided attention, and more importantly, her personal caring. It was a skill she had learned from her father, Gordon.

Her presence, and the ideas she brought with her changed the mindset on the Coast which until then had largely been focused on harvesting. They were coal miners, gold miners, fisherman, foresters. She introduced the concept of sculpting greenstone (jade) which until then had only been used to create tiny trinkets for the tourism trade. In 1966, West Coasters were knocking over rimu forests, turning them into 4x2s and shipping them off overseas without adding any value. She ensured that timber began to be used for furniture and sculpture. She also taught Coasters how to prospect for clay and the materials need for glazes, and then how to throw pots, build kilns, and to fire them to create unique West Coast pottery fired with coal. One of her students, Ian Dalzell (now 60) is New Zealand’s only potter firing with coal.

In 1968, Yvonne was presented with the Silver Medal for Services to the Arts by the Canterbury Society of Arts.

In 1969 she established the Mawhera Potters Association on the West Coast (disbanded in 2012).

In 1970, she attended Art70, a major national arts conference held at Victoria University in Wellington, and received a standing ovation for her speech about putting aside some of New Zealand’s natural resources for artists of the future. She also raised the prospect of a Raw Materials Institute which was very well received.

That same year, TVNZ produced a documentary on her activities on the West Coast, entitled, Fire on the Coast.

In 1971 she moved to Whangarei in Northland and set about building a new pottery and an earth-house. By then Yvonne had been potting for almost 25 years and she knew what could be done with clay. But the local Council didn't know, and they were extraordinarily concerned about a house being built with clay and recycled materials, and they made her life very difficult throughout the building process. So that others wouldn’t have to engage in the same battles she’d had to, Yvonne ensured that an Earth-Building Code was developed for New Zealand, and that Code is today cited on every single earth-building in the country, and there are now very many of them. She also instituted the Earth Building Association of New Zealand (EBANZ), and that is today the only owner-builder voice in the country.

In 1972 Yvonne received a Fellowship for Services to the Arts from the QEII Arts Council.

By 1973 she was running summer pottery schools at the new property and many of today’s potters either picked up or developed their skills through this informal school. From a pottery standpoint, Rust was revolutionary because she sought to move out of the popular domestic ware, or rather to augment it with clay sculptural forms, and it is for these which she is most recognized. The pottery goblet is one of her innovations. She experimented continually, always seeking to extend her skill and the realms of pottery as a valuable resource, coming from clay, much of which was free for the picking up.

In 1975 she was made an honorary member of the NZ Society of Potters.

In 1981 Yvonne set up the Quarry Arts Centre in Whangarei. It was set up as an arts resource centre, but also as a place where experimentation could be carried out on New Zealand’s raw materials/natural resources. She hoped visitors to the Quarry would not only see how artists worked, but precisely what they contributed to society, both culturally and economically. She also hoped the Quarry would become a progenitor for cottage industries. Today the Quarry is a well established arts centre which runs the popular annual Summer Do instituted originally by Rust. The Summer Do brings in expert arts tutors from around the country to run workshops in a variety of disciplines from earth-building, to painting, singing, screen-printing, sculpture, pottery, painting, and many more.

On 27 May 1983 Yvonne Rust was awarded the Queens Service Medal for Services to Pottery and the Arts. That year she also received a National Bank Art Award for Painting.

In 1986 at the age of 65, Yvonne Rust retired to Opua in the Bay of Islands in Northland to paint full-time. It was her first love, and now that she had a pension, she could afford to indulge it. Between 1986 and 1998 when she stopped painting due to ill health, she produced somewhere in the vicinity of 1400 works.

In 1988, Kaleidescope produced, Leading from Behind, the promotion for which stated, “Kaleidescope profiles one of NZ's most unconventional, energetic and influential art teachers, Yvonne Rust.”

In 1989 Yvonne Rust, QSM was made a Life Member of the Crafts Council for her contribution to art and craft education. She moved back to her beloved West Coast, to Runanga, in 1998, and established the Yvonne Rust West Coast Arts Trust in 1999.

She died on 26 July 2002 in Greymouth after a fall in which she broke her hip a few days earlier in her railway cottage home. Her legacy, apart from huge bodies of work in pottery and painting, is in the artists she left behind across a wide range of disciplines who today continue to contribute to New Zealand’s culture and heritage. Amongst them: architects, potters, painters, jewellery designers, theatre directors, ballet dancers, arts educators, ceramic artists, and many more.