Sheridan Keith’s memoir, Wing Dust is a captivating tribute to her mother, the groundbreaking artist June Black (1910-2009) whose unconventional spirit helped shape New Zealand’s art scene last century.
A painter, ceramicist and writer, June was a pioneer in her time, blending existentialist thought, surrealist whimsy and theatre into her work.
Her daughter Sheridan, has drawn on June’s extensive journals to create a vivid narrative. She quotes generously from the many journals her mother kept for more than forty years. Through these excerpts, readers are invited into the mind of a woman who challenges the conservative, male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 60s. During this time, she strived for recognition and boldly defied the norms of her era.
What makes Wing Dust so engaging is its layered storytelling. Sheridan skillfully shares her mother’s creative journey alongside the personal challenges she faced. This is not just a memoir, it’s also a glimpse into a fascinating period of Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. A celebration of creativity, fearless exploration and resilience.
“When I was a child, and she was my mother, and we lived in Wellington as a family in a two-storey house on Mount Victoria with my father and my sister, she was always writing in her sausage books. That was what she called her journals, sausage books, because you put everything into them, meat and spice and offal and bread, everything that was in any way nourishing to the imagination, anything that would enhance her life and feed her inner world. She was reaching that point in her life many women discover, after they have done the thing of finding a mate and having a few children, that the domestic scene in its daily and repetitive trivia holds a barrenness of sustenance for a thinking person. She was in her forties at this time and Wellington in the 1950s was an interesting place where things were just starting to happen - an intellectual stirring, you might call it, to do with education and architecture and art, and coffee,” says Sheridan.
For anyone interested in art, feminism or the lives of those who dare to defy convention, Wing Dust is a must-read. Sheridan Keith runs Blikfang Art and Antiques in Auckland. She is also known for her work as a journalist and fiction writer.
Reviewer: Andrea Molloy
Cuba Press