Page 176 - Constructing Craft

Home Grown Rural Craft – Helen Mason

The potter Helen Mason was from the same generation as the Davises and the
Lairds but was New Zealand born. She decided for different reasons to live and

work in the country. Her move to the Wairarapa in late 1965 to work alone and then
her involvement in a craft partnership in the Waitakeres in Auckland were ways of

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overcoming the ‘suburban neurosis’ she appeared to be suffering from and also a
means of escaping from an unhappy marriage. Trying to earn a living from her
pottery was difficult but she found the rural environment and the camaraderie of

fellow craftspeople enjoyable: ‘We were making a statement about a simpler and
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happier way of life’. In a curious statement, suggesting that the groups she lived
and worked with had pre-empted communes, or even the Māori concept of whānau,

she described the grouping as ‘an extended family before anybody had thought of
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extended families’. Mason was describing a social structure that emerged when
people with similar interests worked and lived together – often in a rural
environment. Because the predominant reason the community Mason was

associated with was craft it may have had a more cohesive feel to it than the

Bruderhof Community that the Davises had rejected. Alternatively, when she wrote
these impressions many years had passed since they had happened and she may

have been influenced by a sense of nostalgia. Helen Mason often reflected on
where the movement had come from and where it might go. Her reflections

interlinked the notions of simplicity and ‘the value of handicrafts as a forerunner of a
better world to come when every man and woman will tend their own vines and live

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in peace with their neighbour’.

Constructing Craft