Christina Conrad
Christina Conrad has been called New Zealand's greatest living
artist. She is certainly its greatest eccentric. An obsessive poet, playwright
and "outsider" painter & sculptor, she lived as a recluse for twenty years
without electricity or running water, where she "kept her paintings in cupboards
instead of food". Her work is disarmingly original and not easily pigeon-holed,
nor does the term "outsider" sit easily with her, suggesting as it does someone
who is untrained. Conrad's paintings and clay sculptures possess a focus that
reflects a rigorous self-training. What one perceives as polish is essentially
her obsessive preoccupation with allowing the paint its own life.
Conrad is the author of three books and a play,
entitled A Modern Crucifixion. She is listed in the Bloomsbury Book of Women
Writers (U.K.) and her poems anthologised in Emu & Kiwi (ed by Barbara
Petrie), The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Verse (ed by Ian Wedde)
and The Oxford Book of Modern New Zealand Poetry (ed by Vincent Sullivan). In
June, 2000, the University of Auckland Press published a selection of Conrad's
poems in Big Smoke, their definitive anthology of New Zealand poetry in the
1960s and 70s. Her work also appears in numerous print journals, little
magazines, and newspapers round the world. The poet, Billy Marshall Stoneking,
describes the experience of listening to Conrad speaking her poetry as "tribal,
unearthing some deep, instinctual understanding that has been buried in the
unconscious. She is bardic."
Conrad's paintings, clay icons and artistic theories
have been the subject of three documentary films, and her paintings and other
works shown by major galleries and museums in the United States, Australia, New
Zealand, and Europe. She is the daughter of the English painter, Patrick Hayman.
Poems:
&
fast link to soup poets:
Kieran Carroll/Chris
Grierson/Cassie Lewis/Peter
Murphy/Adrian
Rawlins/
Brendan Ryan/John West/Lauren
Williams