Page 56 - Constructing Craft

Mollie Miller Atkinson began her training at Southland Technical College in 1926

studying a wide range of subjects including metalwork before moving to Wellington
where she focused on metalwork under the tuition of Freddy Lipscombe. She

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adopted Lipscombe’s anthroposophist values and married Hal Atkinson in 1936.
Atkinson, a Quaker, held similar beliefs and was a part-time metalworker. Mollie’s

health deteriorated while she worked with metal and she abandoned her career to

become a well known book illustrator and painter.

All the jewellers and metalworkers discussed above were influenced by the Arts and
Crafts Movement, particularly the British movement, to some extent. Their careers

also illustrate the way that many craftspeople balanced their craft and their ‘other’
jobs or interests. Some earned a living working within an environment that was

sympathetic to their craft while others found their craft was very much a home-

based leisure pursuit. To some extent, it was their level of dedication, their ability to
promote themselves and the desire of later craftspeople to link their craft to New

Zealand’s craft traditions that decided how, or if, the pioneers would be
remembered in the future.

Glass
The early production of objects in glass in New Zealand was generally limited to

industrial sites such as glass works and most domestic glass was imported from

Britain. The development of a glass industry in New Zealand had been very slow
and fraught with difficulties. In 1870, for instance, while there was a severe shortage

of bottles, attempts to set up bottle and glassworks failed because of high setup

costs, the high cost of imported sand, the absence of skilled glass workers, and
competition from importers. Two examples of this early development were the

Auckland Glass Company which existed for a short period after 1871 and a small
glass works set up by Michael Cook, an Australian, in Wellington around 1898.

Later the Dunedin Glass Manufacturing Company made domestic objects during the
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1920s. New Zealand’s most successful glassware factory was Crown Crystal

Constructing Craft