20 Living

From her eyrie high above Muriwai Beach on Auckland’s west coast, fabric artist Liz Smith can watch the waves roll in from way out in the Tasman Sea. The ocean, beach, bush and wildlife inspire her work, giving it a unique New Zealand flavour.

LIZ: I’ve been here for seven years now. We had a bach down the road for 18 years and bought this section about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, my husband [Rob Hutchison] died two years ago – he grew up surfing out here. I was more of an east coast girl. One of our first dates was a drive out here to look at baches, and so I was introduced to the west coast lifestyle.

The environment does attract artists, just as Raglan and Piha do. It’s rugged and wild. We’re surrounded by nature. We’ve got forest, we’ve got beach, farmland, space. The east coast is very pretty, but the west coast has something extra.

To live here you have to be a little bit rugged yourself, because you have to put up with a lot. Hardly anything grows, except flax, mānuka and cabbage trees. The wind is pretty fierce and we used to have power cuts, but Vector has fixed the lines. We’re on tanks and quite often we run out of water. It feels quite rural and remote, even though it’s only 35 minutes from town at off-peak times.

It’s not hard to get motivated out here. It’s just beautiful, and the birdlife is amazing. The tūī are just nuts, they love the flax flowers and I will have a dozen tūī here in the mornings. Kererū often dip and fly past, and gannets too. And there are seals with pups clambering up the rocks on the island, and sometimes you can see whales.

This house was designed by architect Julian Guthrie, and this [board-formed] concrete wall in the living area is actually 9m high. Back in the day it was one of the first ones like this to be poured. The prevailing wind hits it from the southwest, and I don’t even hear it.

I’ve only been doing fabric art for about 10 years – I had been in the corporate world.

I’ve always been a little bit crafty and I started my business The Stitchsmith, which is mostly embroidery and needlepoint. I was looking for contemporary New Zealandflavoured patterns and couldn’t find anything myself, so I designed some, and the feedback from friends was great. I went to a few shops with kits, and they said “this is amazing; we don’t have anything like it”, and it just took off.

It’s only in the past few years that I have started doing art for me, as opposed to designing kits. It’s a completely different strategy. I was persuaded to join the Muriwai Open Studios group about three years ago. We have just had our Open Studios art trail, and it was packed. We had such a busy weekend, and it was great to see so many people coming from town and further away.

We have collected quite a bit of art – I’m running out of space. There are pieces from Philip Trustrum, which was the very first piece I bought, Dick Frizzell, Richard Killeen, an Aboriginal artist and local artists, including Tanya Blong.

Recently, I have been exploring different media. I still do a lot of birds, flowers and leaves, and I incorporate natural things into the art, including lacy [skeletal] leaves with embroidery on very fine organza. I found some tūī feathers – every now and then you come across a dead bird in the forest, so I bring it home and take off the feathers. A poor rosella flew into my glass window, so I put him in the freezer and plucked him. I’ve used his feathers on a few things.

But while embroidery is my main work, lately I have been doing rug tufting, and moving into more abstract works that are very colourful and a bit “out there”. But at the back of it all is the sense of “being grounded”. I’m very lucky to live in such a beautiful place, and I am grateful every day.