Jeweller David McLeod first made his name as a sculptor, with works displayed around the motu in Dunedin, Palmerston North and Te Papa Museum. Beloved to The Poi Room, David's signature pieces grace the hands, necks and ears of many customers and staff alike. Jo Davies chatted with David about his journey.
David is a great conversationalist with many stories to share, so for the most part we ignored the formal questioning and just had a good yarn. We began with our feelings around the current geopolitical state of the world:
JD: How are you?
David McLeod: Yeah, doing ok, it's a weird and strange world we live in. You've just got to enjoy the moment really, don't you?
JD: You do. And sometimes I think, is what I'm doing meaningful? And then I think, yes, it is because art is important to have in the world, you've got to have joy.
David McLeod: If we don't have room for art in the world, we don't have room for anything, do we?
JD: So how did it all begin? And when?
David McLeod: I guess it all begins with my childhood. My mother's father was a watch maker and jewellery repairer in Ashburton. And my father's father was a carpenter and woodworker. If it hadn't been for the depression and the war, they both would have liked to have gone to an art school or be trained in the arts. So, they never had the opportunity. And because of that, the opportunities were there for me. So I had access to a workshop; we did wood turning and I remember being two maybe, hammering nails and straightening them out on the concrete and I've got a bowl somewhere that I turned when I was 8 years old on the lathe. I was always painting and drawing, picking up rocks. Not just the pretty rocks, the interesting rocks. I grew up in Alexandra where there are lovely rock formations and the landscape's quite sort of sculptural in its own way. So I had been encouraged by family and when I finally went to art school, my mother took the first paid job I ever knew she had, working in a cafe out the back. She did that to help pay my way through art school.
JD: How wonderful.
David McLeod: We were encouraged to do what we wanted to do. Dad taught me problem solving, I guess, teaching me that when you're making something if it doesn't work this way, you do it that way or this tool is designed to do that, but if you do this with it, you can do that with it. So it was never straight line thinking. My dad was left-handed but forced to be right-handed. So when we planed a piece of wood if the grain was wrong, we'd just turn around and plane it the other way because that's what Dad did.
JD: So he taught you ambidexterity.
David McLeod: Yes, which is I think quite advantageous with jewellery making. I always used to say to my students that when you're making something it's a dance. You're not just filing and pushing with one hand because the other hand is changing the angle or the position. Dad would do the same with wood turning. It's not just about that two square inches where the tool's working which most people focus on, it's also how you stand, how you position yourself which enables you to do it. Mum was a keen gardener and I've inherited that. I enjoy gardening and plants. As children we had a square metre of ground each to grow whatever we wanted and I still grow a lot of vegetables. Whenever we've changed houses, I normally have the potatoes sprouted, ready to go in, and I'm digging up the ground before I'm unpacking generally. I've also become fig obsessive!
JD: David has recently joined a drawing group, and he shows me some of his plant drawings, including a beautiful Trillium flower.
Left: Trillium, Right: Japanese Iris. "The original plant actually came from my grandmother's garden," says David.
David McLeod: I spend a couple of hours with them on a Thursday morning and we go out for coffee or lunch afterwards. It's a way of connecting with a new community after moving to Palmerston North from Dunedin three years ago.
Trilliums take seven to 10 years from seed. I haven't been successful with them up here, they need the cold to thrive. You just roll with the punches.
JD: I love the old bits and pieces around your workshop. That's a huge anvil in the photos!
David McLeod: Yes, I don't know if it's bigger than I need, but I often make my own tools. When I was teaching I encouraged the students to make their own tools too. It empowers them in a way and it's nice to pass it on. If you've got a piece of steel in your kit and you need a particular tool, you don't go and order it and wait 3 days for it to turn up and then find it still needs adapting when it arrives. You get out and make it yourself.
JD: Where were you teaching?
David McLeod: I taught at the art school in Dunedin in the sculpture department. I did mainly the non-metal jewellery, the stone, bone, shell, wood, resin, glass.
A good friend Blair Smith worked there in those days. After we both left teaching, we set up a workshop together called The Workspace Shed because we basically lived and worked in our sheds at the bottom of the garden. No longer with us, Blair Smith was a great inspiration and mentor as I developed my jewellery practise. I have some of his pieces, which are very dear to me.
There's lots of things around in the workshop, it's just nice having interesting things around me, the things that sort of inspire me and out of the chaos … When I was studying in Melbourne Michael Leunig (cartoonist) was the person who kept me sane; his cartoons and way of seeing the world. I went to a talk with him once. He spoke about how the duck turned up in his work. There was an ink spot in the cartoon and he turned it into a duck and that's where it started. He said "Out of the chaos comes the redemption" so I said this to him afterwards while he was signing a book for me and he said "I don't remember saying that".
Students used to say similar things to me like "that's pretty inspiring what you said, you should write a book about it" and I'd say "I could write a book about it, but this is a conversation between you and me about this moment and about what's right for now".
It's not necessarily a universal truth, it's a particular thing. And I think Leunig felt much the same way, that it came out of the conversation that he was having with the interviewer. I like that. Out of the chaos comes the redemption.
I was 16 when I started art school. My keen interest at that stage was doing watercolours and painting. Eventually I got interested in ceramics and then I got bored with that and got into stone sculpture.
The biggest piece I've ever made is in a building here in town. It's 25 ft high in black marble terrazzo and bronze. It weighs about 6 ton.
Left: David's Sculpture on the Gallagher building in Palmerston North Right: "Divisions," 1985
In the forecourt there's another piece made out of 79 blocks of marble and a column of sheet bronze in the middle that I made 1984. It's based on a local legend where a Māori Kaumatua was looking for his wife when he thought she'd been kidnapped. He named all the rivers in the area according to how he crossed them. So the wall piece is a big black river flow with five or six markers that run across it like you're wading across a river. When the Kaumatua finally found his wife, he discovered she'd left of her own volition so he sent her out into Pukerua Bay to pick pipis and cockles and turned her into a column of stone.
Hence the forecourt one is like water swirling around a column of rock. That's the sort of scale I used to work at and then I got into bone carving.
I did a lot of small scale netsuke-type pieces. But they ended up going from the maker to the collector and never got handled and worn. I did a masters degree in Melbourne in 96-98, studying the history and influence of that art form in Australia and New Zealand but also to find another way of using it, and so I started to create narrative pieces which were about the two or three elements together.
Above, right: David loves playing Tom Waits in his workshop (seen in the poster in the background), saying "The rhythms and the poetry are a great fit. I like his idea that 'we are all just gravel on the road' that we make one continuous creative path and we learn from who and what has gone before us." David's favourite Tom waits song is "Green Grass".
When I was studying in Melbourne I also learnt about metal working, basically by sticking my nose into the workshops and asking if I could have a go. I'd look at what the students were learning and taught myself well with their help.
Carving had become too stressful on my body and I had developed RSI. Part of the multitude of things I have on the go at one time is to help prevent the RSI because it means that I'm not spending a whole day filing or hammering. I'm always changing my posture and my stance.
Above: David's hugely popular Matchstick series, in progress and finished pieces.
JD: Do you know how many pieces you make a week roughly?
David McLeod: No, I don't really - I don't tend to make one piece at a time. If I'm making earrings, I'll make 10 pair at a time and then I'll usually have the next 10 half started. That's the way it works for me economically. Sitting and doing one piece at a time? I can't do that. I love starting things, I'm not so good at finishing them!
I used to work in a foundry producing molding boxes and grinding castings. I’d set myself targets and things to do and always enjoyed looking over my shoulder and seeing what I'd done for the day. So, yeah, some days it feels like I'm making a lot of things, but generally it's the combination of weeks of work where I'm doing the finishing touches and all of a sudden they're there and ready to go out.
I had somebody ask me, "How many pieces do you have on the go at once?" and I did a count up around my workshop, and I think there were about 30 or 40 pieces partly made. So, there's always something to work on.
Above: A selection of David's beautiful rings. The stones are Pounamu, Opal, Mother of Pearl, Chrysoprase and Sapphire.
There are a couple of quotes from people that inspire me and one is Kobi Bosshard who curated the second New Zealand Jewellery Biennial, 'Same But Different', at The Dowse Art Museum in 1996. Most of the show was full of the things that people repeated, it was their current stock. And Kobi said "If it's worth making, it's worth repeating".
The other is from Rainer Beneke, he once came and talked to students with me and said, "What do you do in the last 15-20 minutes of the day when you're planning to go home at 5:00 and it's 20 to 5? Do you pack up and go home early or do you roll out some metal and make some earring wires or draw down some stock to work on?"
So if I'm making something, I'm soldering something, it's sitting in the pickle, then I'm filing something else and I've got another bench going where I'm working on an old piece or whatever. So there's always something to do and I like it that way. It's a dance.
A friend's son of about seven or eight came and visited the workshop and I made a ring for him, stamped his name on it and sent him on his way. Half an hour later he returned with his Mum and he'd made a wonderful drawing of me on rollerblades playing with fire hurtling around the workshop. It must have seemed to this kid that I was this sort of whirling dervish going around the workshop. I've still got the drawing somewhere.
Above: Earrings in progress featuring Mother of Pearl, Rhodonite, Pounamu and Lapis Lazuli. David developed a four point crimp setting arrangement as a way to get around a technical difficulty, which has now progressed to become his much-loved signature crimped range.
JD: Making your living as an artist must be the dream, is it?
David McLeod: It's not been the easiest, right? My wife (Anne Jackman) has supported me a lot, she's been an excellent sponsor. When we first got married she was heading off to library school and at that stage I was driving a mobile library and doing sculpture work and I said "I might go to library school too", and she said "I married a sculptor not a librarian, get on with it".
So she's been a good supporter and backed me all the way. Sometimes you'd sell one or two pieces a month or whatever, but now it pays its way.
JD: What do you love about working and living in Aotearoa?
David McLeod: I like it here with the traditions from Māoridom where Amulets and Toanga are worn and have meaning and history and generational connections. Being a maker here in that sort of legacy and environment is really quite special. I enjoy the fact that I see more jewellery worn in the supermarket here than I see at a jeweller's conference in Melbourne.
People embrace it and they enjoy it but also, it's a good place to live. It's a long way from anywhere. I enjoy our country and its history.
JD: This seems trivial after everything we've talked about, but what's your coffee order?
David McLeod: It's black. It has to be. People say, "do you mind if it's a double shot?" I'd be upset if it wasn't.
JD: What would you like your lasting impression or your legacy to be as an artist?
David McLeod: That people I’ve taught or encouraged keep making, and the people I’ve made things for or have bought or been gifted my work continue to enjoy it, and pass it on.
I had a friend in Tasmania say to me recently, "What's going to happen to all your stuff when you go? All your tools and your equipment." And I said, "When my brother asked my dad that question in his late 80s, he said, "Not my problem". And five years after he passed away, we were still digging out the workshop and all the timber and stuff that was there. But I'd just like people to continue to enjoy my work.
Thank you for everything you've shared David, we really appreciate the time you've taken to chat.
