(JP/Ricky Yudhistira)
The town of Provost, population 1500, on the praries of Alberta,
Canada, is a far cry from the hectic streets of Jakarta where ELizabeth
Menzie's now lives and the wilderness of Papua, the subject of her
latest work. But it was there that, 54 years ago, this avid artist,
intrepid traveler
and passionate women’s rights advocate was born with a desire to
create.
“I had my first camera when I was 10 years old,” she says. “It was a little brownie camera that I found in my mother’s closet and it had a broken lens so you had to shake it to make sure the lens got in the right place. I don’t know what the drive was way back then, but it’s obviously been with me my whole life.”
Growing up in such a small town made it difficult for Menzies to explore what would become a lifelong love affair with art. “I didn’t really have any access to any scenes or exhibitions or really any art. It was really difficult because I had this strong interest and I was very creative but had no outlet for it. It took me a while to find my way. I had to educate myself a lot.”
She was able to begin exploring her complementary passion – traveling – also when she was 10, when her father, a wheat and cotton farmer, bought a property near Moree in New South Wales, Australia.
“I caught the travel bug very early,” she says, apparently from her father, who, at that time, traveled around Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “He would come home with all these pictures and I remember seeing these slides of Tahiti and being in awe, thinking, ‘Ohhh, it’s so green!’”
Menzies did her “first big solo trip” when she was 19, hitchhiking from Melbourne in Australia’s south to Cairns in the north. “But now my daughter is that age and there is no way I would want her doing something like that,” she is careful to add.
At 22, Menzies explored Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan on the back of an army truck. Reluctant to elaborate on what was surely a once-in-a-lifetime experience, she says only “that’s a long, long story”.
Menzies’ originally chosen professional creative path was in interior design, but “I realized that when you work in design, really, you are interpreting other people’s ideas of what they want and not your own. I realized that I’m way too stubborn to do that.
“I want to do my own thing. I wanted to express my own vision and not someone else’s.”
She went back to university and discovered “wonderful” clay. Since earning her degree in fine arts from the University of Calgary in 1980, Menzies has worked most extensively with ceramics.
It was during her college days that she became interested in women’s rights issues after a women’s studies class “really connected”.
“I began working, volunteering at a sexual assault center, as a crisis counselor.” She soon gained a permanent paid position, and this work began to bleed into her art.
“My artwork began to reflect feminist issues and feminist views and I started making sculpture for women’s hospitals. To me it wasn’t two separate things, it was all part of who I am,” she says, adding, “People sometimes said ‘it seems like you have two separate careers going on,’ but actually, in all my life I have discovered that it doesn’t really matter what you do – if you’re passionate about something it finds a way into your life.”
Menzies greeted the opportunity to move to Indonesia in 1994 with characteristic excitement. “I was not one of these people that was like, ‘oh no, we have to move’. It was like ‘yes! We’re going to Indonesia!’” she recounts.
During her first month in Jakarta she joined the Indonesian Heritage Society to learn about the archipelago’s myriad fascinations. “I wanted to learn as much as I could about Indonesia, and being an artist I was immediately attracted to the textiles, to the artifacts, the traditional things – there is just so much. What you can study and learn here is endless.”
Fifteen years later, she gives lectures at the society on, among other things, the tribes of Papua. She also started leading tours, eventually opening her own operation, Ratu Travels.
Her more recent professional exploration of photography arose from a desire to document these many travels. “As I traveled I began to take more photos and as I took more photos I wanted to travel more and so it all developed out of that. It’s just a medium of expression, really. Whether it’s clay, photos, fabric or whatever, multimedia, writing, it’s really all the same.”
A second photography collection – on Indonesia in general – is in the works. “I have a lot of photos from other places,” she says. Her list is extensive, including Ambon, East and West Nusa Tenggara and Central Sulawesi.
Now that her husband is retiring, Menzies is looking forward to strapping on her backpack and joining him on an exploration of South America. “I’ve never been [to South America] and I’ve never been to Africa either. I have two whole continents left to do – I have a lot of traveling left in me!”
Rest assured that the new paths she forges will produce more captivating images for those of us not as blessed by the travel gods as Elizabeth Menzies.
