Designer, painter, writer and champion of the Matarawa rail service - Rhondda Greig is a living treasure.

Meeting Wairarapa artist and writer Rhondda Greig in person it’s no surprise that she’s full of colour and as neat as a pin - her work is the same. Also with hardly a stick out of place is the mid-19th century Matarawa cottage Rhondda shares with her husband, journalist, archivist and former ‘Fair Go’ presenter Hugo Manson.

A roaring log burner warms the front room, classical music wafts airily from the music machine, and immaculate furniture is placed ‘just so’ around art-filled spaces.

In fact, creating living spaces could well have been a career for Rhondda – she began her tertiary study in the architecture department at Auckland University, at that time a hotbed of exciting new talent and experimental design work. Like her friend and fellow Wairarapian, architect Max Edridge, Rhondda had been captivated by the then dean of the school, Dick Toy.

“I was finishing up at Epsom Girls Grammar”, she recalls, “and I was taken personally to visit Professor Toy. I remember being enchanted going in to his home – it was an architectural space that you just discovered as it opened up and as the rooms presented themselves. I loved learning, I wanted to go to university, and there were hardly any women doing architecture at that time so it seemed very exotic!”

Although the course was abandoned in favour of fine arts, having been seduced by the part-time Elam drawing classes, architecture remains an intense interest – “you could say that it informs my work to this day”.

Architecture was also the catalyst for Rhondda’s meeting her first husband, Jim Greig, when he was flatting at one of Auckland’s legendary party flats. Jim had also studied architecture and was also to drop out in favour of the arts. Jim became one of New Zealand’s foremost artist potters.

“There was some alarm that Jim wasn’t going to follow architecture”, Rhondda remembers, “but he’d met Len Castle and fell in love with the idea of using clay to create”. Establishing a pottery and kiln at Maungakaramea, just south of Whangarei, the couple had two children before Jim was offered a tutoring job at the Massey University Craft School by Jack Laird, a disciple of the legendary British potter Bernard Leach. But by 1970, after three years in Palmerston North and a few months in Wellington, the Wairarapa countryside was wagging a beckoning finger.

The daughter of a career railwayman, Rhondda Greig’s life began in Invercargill and progressively moved north as each promotion was awarded her father, eventually arriving in Auckland in her early teens. Dad introduced outdoor drawing sessions for Rhondda and her sister, while mother was a singer and reader and had “a great aesthetic”

“I remember my first year at primary school. I’d done a pastel drawing on black paper and the teacher held it up to show the class - I couldn’t understand why she was holding my drawing up! Looking back, I guess it was very early affirmation that I could do something that other people responded to … “

After much door-knocking the Matarawa five-acres-with-cottage was discovered and secured, and Jim and Rhondda settled in to the dream of full-time artists bringing up their children in the rural idyll. “I look back now and I think it was a great achievement supporting the family exclusively from art.” Rhondda also remembers the Wairarapa in the 70s and early 80s as “a very lively, intelligent, diverse community of people establishing themselves as artists, musicians and theatre people.”

The couple was soon firmly established, Jim building an increasing reputation as a leading ceramicist and Rhondda teaching part-time at Makoura College and developing an interest in children’s books. The prize-winning “Matarawa Cats” emerged in 1984 and was followed by “Matarawa House”. She also accepted a commission for a large banner installation for Wellington’s new police station (After Jim died) – large-scale public work has been an enduring interest for the artist.

Life was to deal the family a bitter blow, however, with Jim suffering a lethal heart attack while setting up an exhibition of his work in Kyoto, Japan in 1986.

With the autumn sun pouring into an already very cosy sitting room, talk turns to the fallout from the Cuisine School and the need for something to replace it as a drawcard for the Wairarapa. “We need an artifact or an object which will keep the flow of people coming to the Wairarapa”, Rhondda tells me. “It should build on our cultural foundation, farming, Maori. It should be something huge in the landscape that really defines it. The idea’s been talked about before – we need to revisit it. And when something happens, I’ll be up for it!”

Creating a bit of a stir in the landscape is nothing new for Rhondda Greig. When Matarawa railway station was threatened with closure not so long ago she was at the forefront of the movement to save it. And when the battle was won she took up her paintbrush and beautified the station with a mural – a work of public art. When the work was painted over recently by an over-enthusiastic maintenance gang, the howls of protest pierced the Rimutakas, all the way to Toll’s head office. “Apparently they got more complaints about the removal of the mural than they’d ever had about twisted tracks or late trains”. Once again, the artist had demonstrated that she was able to produce work to which people responded.

The dawn of this new millennium brought with it a new husband, a major new installation project, and “the start of an international commuting married life”.

Hugo had taken up a job in Aberdeen, Scotland, doing a big oral history project on the oil industry in Britain. “It coincided with my involvement with the Landmarks Trust, which was set up to create a monument to New Zealand women,” Rhondda explains. “It was a secular work within a church environment at St Paul’s Cathedral – a three-year project which I finished in 2004.”

The following year Rhondda was invited to be Artist in Residence at the University of Aberdeen, the residency to take place at the Marischal Museum, the brief to work on an exhibition that commented on the relationships between Scotland and New Zealand. This was clearly a very satisfying period in the artist’s life.

“Coming from the isolation of rural New Zealand, the interactions and discussions with my colleagues at the museum were immensely stimulating and enjoyable”. Working from her studio in the granite tower of the university museum, Rhondda produced fine drawings and paintings based on the “kete” housed in the museum’s collection. Adding a little piquancy to the brief for the exhibition was the fact that the museum’s collection of preserved Maori heads was at that time being returned to New Zealand.

Also during this time Rhondda worked with Mark and Jane Burry on a proposal for the planned war memorial to New Zealanders in Hyde Park, London, for which they were eventually short-listed. “Mark was working in Melbourne and Barcelona, I was between Aberdeen and New Zealand, and the site was in London – it was a real cross-continent international endeavour! While we missed out on the eventual commission, I found it professionally very satisfying. It made me more aware of how to present creative ideas on a large scale. I’d be very interested in doing another site-specific work in New Zealand.”

By the end of 2006 all the globe-trotting was wearing thin and Rhondda returned to Matarawa, spending all of 2007 setting up her studio, fixing up the cottage, re-establishing herself in the Wairarapa, and picking up on a project which had been “three-quarters done” before the Aberdeen residency.

“Noa’s Calf” is a children’s book with no words – the narrative is in the images. Being published by Mallinson Rendel (publishers of the Hairy Maclary books), the model for the story is Noa Cerson, son of Greytown’s French baker Moise Cerson. Moise himself also appears as the father in the story. It is expected to be released in early 2009.

There is also a new series of paintings in the wings, and other sculptural possibilities being investigated.

While Matarawa is clearly big enough to have a railway station – and hundreds of commuters must pass through it each day – it remains one of those peaceful little pockets of the Wairarapa where a continent-hopping creative couple of some renown might become … almost invisible.

Graciously posing for the inevitable photograph for this story, Rhondda Greig is anything but invisible in her own landscape. “I guess my life is my work, really,” she offers, beaming like she wouldn’t have it any other way.