With a father who loved European history and could play instruments by ear and a mother who had a flair for cooking, gardening, sculpture and sewing, it was a given that Vee Niederer and her siblings would inherit the creative gene.
Her father was also a skilled and self-taught draftsperson and his talent intrigued Vee as a child. She watched as he transformed waste land near Whakatāne into family housing.
As a high school exchange student Vee spent a year living near New York City in 1970. The Humanity Class proved enriching, and frequent visits to the Big Apple exposed Vee to different creative influences in the city.
She started painting in 1992, and although busy in a business with her husband, she found time to travel to Europe to do art courses. A trip to Italy in 1996 was life changing – she fell in love with the slumbering sonorous beauty as part of daily life, the cadence of the language, and the careful conservation of living space. She was also inspired by the architecture, both ancient and modern, and studied the construction and longevity of buildings and whether things needed to be repaired or not. She found that making art was a way to share these reactions.
Experimental work with heavy 300gsm watercolour paper directed Vee’s ‘buildings’ to become more tactile within her paintings. She found she could rip paper to roughen column edges and stitch parts of her ‘paper’ buildings with copper wire to ‘repair’ them.
Vee would visit the local auto electricians and glass companies to procure wire, shattered windscreen glass and pieces of scrap metal to help create her assemblage paintings. Finding ways to recreate this medieval architecture was a 20-year path and the influences of Italian frescoes, carvings and statuary in churches and the piazzi encouraged her vision.
Another course in 1997, this time at the Verrocchio Art Centro, near Siena, under maestro sculptor Nigel Konstam, opened her eyes to sculpture. He tutored life drawing classes each morning, which helped Vee with her study of the human form, and made three miniature bronze figures of Vee ‘the swimmer’.
Stitching wire on ‘Kiosk’
Both her mixed media paintings and sculpture use asymmetry, imperfect scale, aged textures and tactile surfaces. Her sculptures feature houses with gaping walls and wire- stitched spaces, conveying a sense of being under continuous repair. Her themes are often about restoration – the wonder of the edifice and of a person being able to renew, be reconditioned, as well as the respect for people living in small ancient spaces with narrow alleyways. Soaring buildings show optimism and hope.
More recently, a Welding for Art course at the former Bay of Plenty Polytechnic in 2016 revealed new opportunities. After 20 years of painting mixed-media European architecture, she made a lateral shift to 3-D art using recycled metal, however, themes of deterioration and restoration/optimism continue to appear throughout her work.
“Rough sharp edges, odd angles, no smooth welded seams – these all suited my theme and the material enforced the power of restoration,” she says.