SPIRIT: Conversations with Creative Woman

• Photography - Ann Orman
• Words - Jannine Wilkinson
• Softcover, 318 Pages, 320mm x 235mm

A beautiful coffee-table style book that is rich with beautiful images of New Zealand women creatives, their work, and their spaces. The personal stories of these talented women share intimate details about their lives, their challenges, and their work. Some just at the beginning of their careers, others with a rich 55 years of creating under their belt.

This book showcases 34 extremely talented females at varying degrees in their creative careers, the majority of them 'flying under the radar' - only really known by people in their own circles. With the foreword by the Rt Hon Helen Clark, this book will motivate you to seek your own creative talent.

In 2002 I had a dream - to create a book celebrating the many talented creative females I knew in my life. I was obsessed with buying art and had just bought my first significant piece - a large abstract Piera McArthur painting. Piera McArthur - a wonderfully talented older woman now in her 90's - constantly created these incredible sell-out exhibitions of her work. She was fascinating, and when I spoke to her at one of her exhibitions I knew wanted to photograph and interview her. I decided then that I also wanted to do a book celebrating the creative lives of a number of my female friends. Unfortunately when it came time to produce the book we were unable to secure her as one of the talents - but I still want to acknowledge her influence in the idea.

Anita Blanchett - who is featured in the book - is a longtime dear friend of mine and we had started our creative journeys together - her as a painter, me as a photographer. Before I left for Paris I photographed her painting in her studio and said to her at the time that I wanted to produce this book.

Scan ahead 15yrs and Jannine and I met randomly at my partners work xmas party where we hatched a plan to make the book happen. The rest they say is history. It was a long 4 years selecting, contacting, interviewing and photographing the artists for the book. Unfortunately our launch date coincided with the last 3 month Covid 19 lockdown in Auckland and although we managed to successfully sell the book both on-line and in retail stores through-out NZ it did dampen our big launch party ideas. One of them being gathering all the artists together so they could connect and form a community called The Creative Collective.