Letter #5
After finishing college, I took a gap year, worked a crap job as a Data Services Administrator, saved enough money to buy return tickets to England, and stumbled my way around bars and art galleries, soaking up the bad conversation of drunken hooligans and becoming inspired by paintings the size of small houses, and then I flew back to my homeland to find myself lying on the couch in January of the next year, still with no clue where I wanted go or who I wanted to be.
University didn't excite me. At school I said I'd go on to study advertising, marketing, or some kind of business degree, but lying on the couch that summer afternoon I couldn't conceive of any idea worse than investing thousands of dollars to work my ass off struggling to pass exams that bored me. I did, however, have some desire to study something, I just didn't know what. So, I asked myself a simple question. What excites you? My answer was "clothes".
Google search > Fashion degree > Top result > Bachelor of Design with Honours, majoring in Fashion Design and Business.
Boomshakalaka! The penny dropped. The horn sounded. I had found what I knew in that instant was my near future. I stood up, went straight to the kitchen and said "Mum, Dad, I'm going to study Fashion at Massey". In which they responded, "Um, ok... sounds good Maxwell, but you've never sewn anything in your life...". This was true, but something felt good about this, and I was willing to give it a shot.
So, it was the first day of uni. My mother dropped me off near the campus and I walked up the steep hill towards the crowd of young, hip, and horny students who all, like me, were nervous about what they were getting themselves into. As I got to the top of the hill, an overly enthusiastic guy came up to me and said "Hey man! Come hang out over here." I accepted his welcome and sat next to a Peruvian man named, Luiggi. He is now one of my best friends. We had a similar curiosity about people and the same sense of humour. I was happy. After about twenty minutes, another guy walked into our circle, approached me and said "Dude, you have to try one of these plums, they're unbelievable!". I took a bite and he was right. This was one of the juiciest plums I've ever had in my life. This guy's name was Lewis, or as he introduced himself as, "Forest". Our mutual passion for food and life made him the second best friend I had met within the first thirty minutes of my new adventure into the word of art and design. Things were off to a good start.
The following day was my first ever fashion class - Pattern Making 101. I thought this class was going to be about drawing patterns for textiles or something like that, but I was about to find out how clothes were actually made, and how much work I was going to need to put in to even pass the first year. I arrived to class late, as I did too often in those days, and I entered a massive classroom of thirty girls and two gay guys. Another good start. However, I was told off for being late, which gave off a bad first impression to everyone in the class, but then to make it worse I had absolutely no idea how to do anything they were asking us to do. I felt like a complete knob. However, through months and months of perseverance and a willingness to learn, I finally got recognition for my determination. I just passed that pattern-making paper with a C-. Only upwards from here.
Over the next four years I learnt an incredible amount about myself as a human being and as a designer and artist. I have my own curiosity and discipline to partly thank for this, but mostly to the wonderful people in my life at the time, notably my parents, my friends, and my lecturers. Their support and encouragement to be myself and to continue discovering more and more about life and art kept me moving forward into places I didn't know existed at the time. As a very dear friend of mine once said, "Life is nothing without the connection we have to those we love most."
On a technical level I learnt how to take critiques on my work, what to use and what to throw out. I learnt that seeking advice from a variety of people from different genders, disciplines and skill-levels opens you up to a new perspective on the project. However, you must learn to fundamentally trust your own judgement and your own heart when it comes to making final decisions.
I also learnt how to critically analyse my own work on a technical, conceptual, cultural, social, and political level. It's important to ask yourself questions about how your work relates to all these frameworks and to answer them honestly and open-mindedly. Every challenge should be taken seriously and through this continual critical analysis I developed my own way of structuring, planning, and prioritising my projects. This opened my eyes to what I was good at, what I enjoyed the most, what gave me a real rush, and in my fourth and final year I found this to be an amalgamation of all my passions - fashion, music, performance, and poetry.
At the very beginning of our final year we were given our brief which was a research and development paper that acted as a prequel to our final paper. For this research paper our task was to act and respond to 'Whakatinana', which is to make manifest concepts or ideas. We had to research a large number of creative practitioners and write a 5,000 word proposal on how these people and their work act as a critical framework to our own concept and ideas for the final paper and how these ideas critically engage with the world.
My approach to this was to write a short story called "Dylan, The Revolution" about a young ambitious man on a journey to depart his new inhabited planet of Mooson Hooson and return to Earth with the newfound knowledge and inspiration he found in the people he met on his adventure. All the characters in this story represent the creative and philosophical practitioners that I researched. This was a fun and playful expression of my naive philosophical framework at the time.
The final project of the fashion degree at Massey has always been to develop and execute a 4-look fashion collection for the end-of-year runway. This is an exciting prospect and something everyone looks forward to, however, when we were given the brief to this final paper in August 2017 we had the choice to pursue one of two options - Brief A, which was the standard runway collection, or a "guinea pig" Brief B, which was to create your own brief that had to include some aspect of fashion design. When I read this, my eyes beamed wide open and my legs began to bounce. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I went straight up to one of my lecturers and asked if this was true, and her reply was music to my ears.
After a couple weeks of conceptualisation, I decided to design and stage a 20 minute performance art show based on my very recent and visceral experience with death - the passing of my beautiful Grandmother, Jean. This project would go on to become "Curtains of a Candle", a performance art show which philosophically dramatises our relationship with Death. It aims to balance the beauty with the darkness by personifying the three probing players - Death as Jayne, Humanity as Dylan, and Life as trees, time clocks and bananas. It combines dress, poetry, light, sound and dance to form a powerful and emotive experience.
Through this experimental and testing project as a young, ambitious and developing artist, I discovered my vigour for conceptual art and performance, which has lead me down an extremely meaningful path in life, something I am very grateful for.
Four years, three flats, two relationships, and one degree opened my eyes to a new potential, a community of creatives, a purpose in life, a talent for concept and collaboration, and a raging fever for more. I went from not having ever sewn a piece of fabric in my life and getting a C- on my first paper, to tailoring suits and dresses and getting an A+ on my final paper. This is a story of patience and persistence, ambition and action, and I'm telling you this because it is these stories that have always inspired me to challenge myself and to keep pushing forward into unknown realms where fear meets opportunity and opportunity meets meaning.
If your heart is calling for something, take the risk.
Much love,
Max
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