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