Whether she is working on a ‘Treaty’ cuff, necklaces based on piupiu or finding fresh ways to work with paua, artist and designer Anna Balasaglou keeps returning to New Zealand imagery and identity.
Her show at Aratoi is a selection of work over the past 20 years, along with recent creations based on rata blooms and the rock formations at White Rock on the Wairarapa coast.
She puts her fascination with New Zealand imagery down to the way her family arrived here in a rootless state in 1946, a migration forced on them by World War Two.
“I was born in New Zealand but when I asked where my family came from, they always just told me ‘you are a New Zealander’, so I embraced the culture here. I was bought up around Maori children and I also needed to know about their culture,” she says.
It was only when her cousin the writer and publisher John Balasoglou went on a quest to uncover their family’s history that Anna found out her ancestry, which is Greek, Turkish, Russian, Bulgarian and Romanian. “Interestingly, we found out that ‘Balas’ is an old Greek word that means shield-bearer, so the connection with metal was always there.”
Anna’s struggles at school with undiagnosed (and unsupported) dyslexia left her with an aversion to institutions and rules – her mantra is “the rules are there are no rules” - but she refers to the condition as a ‘learning ability’ because she always recognised her creativity, and affinity with colour and design.
She first got into jewellery in the 1980s, working with a friend in Christchurch who was making bamboo jewellery.
They developed a brand called ‘Cat’s Pyjama’s’ together and Anna says she was “hooked” from then on.
She attended art school at the Polytech in Wairarapa and a number of workshops but is otherwise self-taught, describing herself not as a jeweller but as a designer who has chose this medium to express her vision.
Creating something contemporary and unique is always a priority. She is well known for her luminous paua and resin beads, which were an attempt to move paua out of its clichéd, souvenir context into “something fresh and contemporary that we could be proud of”. Also important is working in a ‘non wasteful’ way, a concept she points out is actually quite ancient: “I have an Egyptian bracelet and I found out that it was a common practice then to create a piece then melt it down and rework it in the latest style at a later date.
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She works with silver, gold, bronze and copper and precious and semi precious stones – many of which she sources from estate jewelry, a way of getting beautiful shapes and cuts, and also “working with the abundance that is already there rather than mining for new materials”.
The new White Rock range was inspired by the White Rock outcrop on the Wairarapa coast. Anna says she was fascinated by the grid-like weathering patterns on the rock and she made each rectangular component by hand.
For her powder-coated White Rock and Rata designs, she worked with local firm Fisher Windows. She also worked with Adair Engraving in Lower Hutt to get camouflage patterns laser-cut into silver for her Camo range.
Anna’s work has caught the eye of Karen Walker and World founder Denise L’Estrange-Corbet, and she is keen to work more closely with the fashion world in future. As well as Aratoi, Anna's work is available at a number of galleries throughout New Zealand.
Now showing at Aratoi: White Rock – new jewellery by Anna Balasoglou; Friends of Aratoi Art Awards 2013, until 3 Feb; Salt: Sound, Light, Touch – Tina-Rae Carter, until 15 Dec; Vincent Ward Breath – the fleeting intensity of life, until 28 Feb; On the Edge – Wairarapa’s Coastal Communities, until 15 Dec.
Wairarapa Museum of Art and History