Marilyn Rea-Menzies

Her grandparents had arrived in Westport in 1920, and her parents Meg (née Eddy) and Alan Rea ran the O'Conor Home Farm from 1947, first on McKenna Road, and then from 1952 at Nine Mile Road.

Marilyn had what she describes as a rural Irish Catholic upbringing, doing farm chores, helping with the milking, and riding horses.

She was educated at St Mary's College in Westport, where her teacher Sister Christopher encouraged her artistic skills, to the point of her passing the preliminary exam for the Diploma of Fine Arts.

Marilyn Rea-Menzies (born 1 February 1944) is a New Zealand artist, principally known for her tapestry work, but who also exhibits drawing, painting, and digital print.

She is considered one of New Zealand's leading textile artists.

Rea was born in Westport on the West Coast of the South Island on 1 February 1944, the eldest of nine children.

Instead of attending art school, she moved to Christchurch at the age of 17 to train as a primary school teacher at Christchurch Teachers' College from 1961 to 1962.

She then moved back to the West Coast and had a brief teaching career before marrying David Menzies in January 1965.

In the 1970s, influenced by Robert Kaupelis' book Experimental Drawing, she started applying grids and distortions to her paintings, which later appeared in her tapestries.

After a short stint in Wellington and the birth of their first child, the couple returned to Westport, where her husband managed the Buller Valley Dairy Company until its closure in 1971.

The family then moved to the North Island, where David Menzies had a series of dairy factory management jobs in Te Puke, Wairoa, and finally Tauranga.

She was also strongly influenced by seeing Colin McCahon's painting On Building Bridges around 1977 in the Auckland Art Gallery.

In 1980, while living in Tauranga, Rea-Menzies taught herself to weave tapestries – she had a small weaving frame constructed and learned the techniques from a library book.

Within a year she had won her first award, at the Bay of Plenty Woolcraft Festival.

Rea-Menzies' early work was inspired by the New Zealand landscape, including a water/sea/sky series woven from 1984 to 1986.

Her response to the enfolding nature of the West Coast landscape has been compared to that of the West Coast artists Sue Syme and Catherine Brough.

Rea-Menzies has been influenced by Colin McCahon, Louise Henderson, and John Weeks, and international artists Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney.

She has said: "The architectural process of building the tapestry, actually constructing the fabric and image together so that the two are physically and visually inseparable, relates very strongly to the process of constructing and building our lives."

Her larger tapestry works are intricately woven and can take months or years to produce.

"It takes me a day to weave a 30 cm square on a plain piece, and up to four days for a more complex design."

When she separated from her husband in December 1985 she resolved to begin an artistic career.

At this time she was running a weaving supply business and had founded an artist co-operative, Viewpoint Studio.

Rea-Menzies lived in Tauranga and nearby Mount Maunganui until 1990.

She returned to the South Island in November 1990, to set up Glenora Craft and the International Weavers' School in Picton, where she spent nearly four years.

Rea-Menzies has been working professionally as full-time artist since the early 1990s.

One the few professional tapestry weavers in New Zealand, and the only one creating large-scale works, she is considered one of New Zealand's leading textile artists and teachers.

Rea-Menzies moved to Christchurch in 1994, initially working from home; with the help of an Arts Council grant she established a public studio in the Christchurch Arts Centre, the Christchurch Tapestry Workshop, in mid-1998, which she operated almost seven days a week.

Visitors occasionally commissioned works from her after visiting the studio; Rea-Menzies would invite them to do some of the weaving themselves, and to cut the tapestry from the loom when it was finished.

Although principally known for her tapestries, Rea-Menzies has regularly exhibited photography and drawing; all three media were part of her 2008 show Underfoot at the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Christchurch.

She also exhibits paintings and digital designs.

She stayed in the Arts Centre until the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, when the damaged building was closed for repair.

Following the 2011 earthquake and her studio closure, Rea-Menzies eventually moved to Hamilton, where four of her five children lived, and remained there for six years.

During this time she sold some paintings (but no tapestries), and taught weaving and drawing.

Gradually her children began to move away from the Waikato, so in 2019 she returned to Westport to set up a studio, gallery, and teaching space.

Rea-Menzies painted and drew from the age of 10, and joined local art groups to keep in practice while her children were growing up.