Career blooms as botanicals inspire

BY BECK ELEVEN

Christchurch woman Jenny Gillies is bringing the Garden City to life with her wearable art creations.

As any decent gardener will know, winter is not the season for the delicate pink peony. However, Jenny Gillies is more of a show peony.

Dressed from stalk to petal in one of her latest creations, the costume artist steps boldly into a chilly Christchurch afternoon to have her photograph taken.

This is the outfit she will wear on stage at the Royal Adelaide Show in September, where she has been invited to exhibit her costumes for the second consecutive year.

The peony rose outfit has been made for the occasion.

"You can wear what you like when you're the designer," she says. "And I always go for the big hats – so if I break my neck, it's nobody else's problem but my own."

Gillies, 60, has managed to forge a niche career making wearable art replicating trees and flowers.

And to prove she's no garden snob, she's even done a show themed on weeds. "Weeds are simply flowers growing in an area they're not welcome."

It is a matter of weeks before Gillies must pack about 90 of these fabric foliage creations into a sea container and ship them to Australia.

Visitors to the Royal Adelaide Show (like our A & P shows) will be able to catch 39 shows over nine days.

The interior of the Gillies' two-storey Strowan home is a visual overload.

Photographs cover the baby grand piano, hundreds of gilt-framed paintings allow only slivers of painted wall to peek through, and pieces of her gigantic botanic art lie ready for shipping or more sewing.

In another room, a puddle of soft toy lambs spills onto the floor ready to be worked into a sheepish outfit. The room features floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a barre.

Gillies and her husband, John, 64, took up classical ballet in their 50s, with a plan to dance their way to fitness, and ended up playing wicked stepmothers, witches and royal pairings.

It developed into a close relationship with other ballet dancers who Gillies employs to dress up in her shows.

John Gillies held the title of clinical director of respiratory services at the Canterbury District Health Board.

That was until he had a series of bypass operations and "realised he was mortal".

"I've become Jenny's factotum," he says.

"Yes, chief bottle washer and cook," she tells him.

In truth, he paints and their walls are covered in his art.

One section lining the staircase shows portraits done while he served as a doctor in the Vietnam war.

"That guy had worms," he says, by way of explanation. "She had a liver abscess, he had a gunshot wound."

A Christchurch girl at heart, Gillies studied at Otago University where she graduated with a science degree in microbiology.

She met John while studying and the couple have been married for 38 years. They have four grown-up children and three grandchildren.

Jenny's mother had always encouraged her to sew and she was dextrous with a needle.

"Our kids were involved in drama at school, and they need parents who were prepared to make costumes and things. I guess that was me."

She tried her hand at theatrical costumes and, in the mid-1990s, fashioned a jolly great sunflower hat that someone wore to Addington Cup Day.

A photo of the hat appeared on the front page of The Press and an appeal went out for this mystery milliner to contact the Festival of Flowers.

It was after the publication of the sunflower hat that her budding career bloomed.

"So what started as a passion and a hobby, still is a passion, but it's also a business. Well, I hate to call it a business, it's an art form to me."

If Pablo Picasso went through his "blue period", then Gillies is in her green period.

She finds inspiration in books, gardens and florist shops.

"A lot of flowers are too tipsy and fiddly, but if the colour is sensational and the form fantastic, then I'm driven to make it.

"It's got to look like it's come to life with bounce and movement. You get to know the material, the movement of a dancer and how they give the flower a personality.

" I don't do clothes any more. I prefer to do mad things."

Gillies' ambition is to exhibit her work in a permanent gallery as a Christchurch tourist attraction, something befitting the Garden City.

Dozens of bolts of fabric about the house are almost uniformly bright and shiny.

She routinely avoids "bridesmaids' colours".

Staff at Mitre 10 might believe her to be a consummate do-it-yourselfer, while Stirling Sports must question her hunger for gold tees, which make ideal parts for the interior of spring daffodils.

Among more than 100 costumes, Gillies has created a eucalyptus, red hot poker, rata, the Mount Cook lily and the fragrantly named stinking iris pod.

The world of wearable botanical art is infinite, she says.

"Nature's good. It's very prolific."

- © Fairfax NZ News