A diary entry from the 1890s says it all: "It is a wet and miserable morning in Dunedin".
Some things do not change as there is similar weather outside when I talk to the author’s great-granddaughter Amy Melchior.
Melchior, an artist and cook, has been looking into the history of the females in her family as part of a project instigated by the death of her much-loved grandmother Audrey Betterton just after celebrating her 99th birthday during the Covid-19 pandemic.
"It has been in my mind for quite a long time. I was incredibly close to my grandmother. She had always been a massive part of me. She taught me how to sew, to cook and enjoy the beautiful things in life."
Many years ago her grandmother gave Melchior her own mother Elsie’s journal written when she was 16 years old and travelling to New Zealand to start a new life. Her grandmother’s death made her think about that past.
"I thought it would be nice to find that connection through the art as well."
As happens in many families after a death there is one group keen to throw everything out and another keen to keep it all. It meant Melchior ended up with what she describes as a "very strange collection" of things that mean a lot to her but probably not to anyone else in the family.
"So I thought I’d quite like to immortalise these somehow so they are suspended in time."
She gathered together letters, drawings, photographs, silk, lace, tea leaves, sand, rust and dried plants that reference not only her grandmother’s journey but also Melchior’s other ancestors Eliza, who left Ireland in the 1840s and travelled to remote corners of the world with her children; Hannah, who gave birth to her great-great-grandmother Janetta (Elsie’s mother) on board a boat from England as they travelled around the Cape of Good Hope; and Elsie, who had the forethought to keep the journal.
"I’ve gone quite deep into the past history of both sides. I’ve looked at the women from both sides of my family and traced what they went through and how they got here."
Melchior, who has lived in Avondale for 25 years, learnt how Eliza travelled around the world after leaving Ireland, spending time in India, Burma, Sri Lanka and Australia before arriving in New Zealand.
"There were interesting changes in their lives during that process. There was the loss of lots of children. That particular woman had a very affluent life in Sri Lanka but by the time she arrived in New Zealand she was extremely poor."
The material is incorporated into her work in lots of different ways, some quite abstract, others like "buried treasures".
"There are lots and lots of layers of things you can see that reference them. Then some are quite abstract — it is more of a sensation of something."
A Very Good Cake (above) includes old family recipes on paper, rusted iron powder and Indian ink in beeswax and dammar resin.
She Marked Her Name with "X" (above right) is made of early letters, recipes, drawings, a gramophone cover, sand, dried flowers, old cross-stitch transfers, dress-maker’s tape, Indian advertising labels, rice paper, pianola paper, rusted iron powder, Indian ink and oil paint.
Driving Creek (right) includes sand, gold and bronze powders, rusted iron powder and Indian ink in beeswax and dammar resin. PHOTOS: SUPPLIED
As Melchior uses the encaustic painting method, where a mixture of beeswax and dammar resin is heated to create a paint, she was able to incorporate some of the ephemera into the wax.
The process involves heating wax until it becomes a liquid. Powdered pure pigments are then added to the wax medium to make the desired colours. The hot liquid wax mixture is applied to a prepared surface, such as a wood panel or paper, using a brush. Each layer of wax is then fused to the layer below using a blow torch or heat gun. The wax can also be layered and fused together with additional layers of wax and other materials such as the recipes and materials from her ancestors.
While Melchior is well used to the way wax works, there was some experimentation involved to incorporate materials which did not go to plan such as using a spray glue to attach recipes to make the base for the wax.
"Wax does not work with anything artificial so I had to start again. It’s quite interesting that fact because it’s so organic you do have to use natural components with it. In this it worked really well as it’s got silk, sand iron, all found in nature or the earth in a way it references someone moving on."
Encaustic painting is a method Melchior discovered while living in Sydney in her late teens and early 20s. Back then she was creating large oil paintings and was searching for a way to impart a translucency to her work, so she had the idea of adding wax to her oil paint.
"I did not know what I was doing."
When her mother invited her on an art teachers’ course on encaustic painting, Melchior grabbed the chance.
"As soon as I learnt the process I loved it. I haven’t picked up any other medium since. It felt like my perfect paint medium; it felt like cooking. Most of all I love the fact that it is completely organic and has so many sensual aspects — it smells of honey."
She discovered encaustic painting incorporated all three methods she enjoyed: print making, oil painting and using wax. It also creates the luminous quality Melchior was seeking.
"The way I use the encaustic is it’s like a print that hasn’t been printed and then you rub ink into the surface at the end so you get a beautiful crossover between all three. It has the amazing ability to do so many things with it.
"Because it is layers and layers and layers, small fused parts of wax light gets trapped inside the painting so you kind of fall into them and they smell amazing — it sometimes attracts the bees, which can be a bit tricky."
The experience of using encaustic painting to create the works for her latest exhibition "She Marked Her Name With X" was a real honour for Melchior. She named the show as a tribute to Hannah, who marked her name with a cross. In those days women who did not know how to read or write signed with a cross on official documents.
"It was a really enjoyable experience diving a bit deeper. You think why didn’t I ask her this? There is that missed information you can’t get back. I learnt heaps of things."
That it was so much easier in the digital age to research family history became apparent when she read one of her grandmother’s mother’s letters, which were all about trying to find information about her father who died when he was young in the early 1900s.
"There was a screed of letters back and forth trying to find out about his life, now there are a million different sites online."
She discovered an article her her grandmother’s father wrote in the Ceylon Times in 1856 about how a whale swallowed the ship’s anchor and towed it around the coast of India.
"It’s hilarious. I talked to my mother about it and she vaguely remembers some story about a boat and a whale but always thought they were lying."
The women who came before her also played a part in Melchior’s direction in life, especially her grandmother’s influence on her cooking.
"Lots of these have recipes in them from her, her mother and grandmother — they are embedded in the works. A love of fabrics, sewing, craft and foraging."
"Which is why there are so many references to sand, sea, rust and plants. It’s where I spent all my summers as a kid, hanging out with my grandparents swimming and foraging."
Melchior can remember being sent up trees to bring down lichen that her grandmother could use to dye the wool she spun.
"We’d collect fruit, shells and seaweed — all those things are in the works. There are lots of references to her."
Her grandmother was an "amazing seamstress" and was also very particular about how she dressed, something many of the family are like.
"She was never a woman who’d wear trackpants — it was liberty silks. She was always well-dressed at all times ready for guests. She was a dapper-looking lady.
"I have the same obsession with good fabric and well-made things. It’s all in it too"
Melchior’s artistic bent came from her mother, an art teacher. The family lived in Hawke’s Bay while she was growing up.
"I grew up in a house full of art — Mum was an artist and art teacher. As a child I was always at the back of the art classroom and always loved to be making things — it was the easiest way to occupy me."
The two are combined occasionally when she uses her grandparents’ seamstress and woodwork tools to mark and scratch on to the wax works.
"I imprint various things people do not realise are there but to me they have meaning — there is definitely a duality to all of it."
Encaustic painting is a difficult medium, she says, but it is also a bit like cooking given it involves pots and pans and heating things up.
"It is not very stable. There is an art to using it in itself but once you have mastered it, it is an extraordinary medium."
Melchior, a mum to two boys aged 25 and 18, normally sources her wax from her uncle’s beehives near Rotorua.
She gets her mother to bring back pigments from Italy and she asks others to keep an eye out for them when they are travelling.
"In Europe they use pure pigments for lots of different kinds of paintings like frescoes and they have an amazing range of colours."
Like the kitchen, the process can be very messy and the risk of getting burnt is always there.
"I’m used to being burnt. I have heat-proof hands."
These days she works from a studio underneath her home, where she can work for hours, often missing meals.
"I think it’s because I have to be insanely focused on either side, cooking or painting."
Melchior is pleased with how her latest works came out and thinks her grandmother would be too, if a "little shocked that I put her lace in a painting".
"I feel I have honoured her, which is what I wanted to do."
Encaustic painting
The word "encaustic" comes from the Greek word "enkaustikos", which means "to burn in". The technique was first used in ancient Greece and Egypt, where it was used to create funerary portraits. Encaustic painting was also popular in the Roman Empire, where it was used to create mosaics and murals. The oldest surviving encaustic panel paintings are the Romano-Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits from Egypt around AD100–300.
To see
Amy Melchior , "She Marked Her Name with ‘X"’, Fe29, June 2 to July 10.
