her home as a canvas

Val Griffith-Jones' downstairs bathroom sums up her passion for colour – bright ribbons of paint tied together by a bold red floor. The Marlborough artist, whose very home is a canvas, used a collection of Resene testpots from her garage to create the stunning striped wall.

Her husband Don McDonald designed their Waikawa home, but gave Val carte blanche when it came to the colour scheme. For someone so enamoured with all colours, that was both exciting and excruciating. "I had the knowledge that once you have chosen one colour, everything else hooks on. All the other colours have to relate to it."

The deep, papal-purple-blue of Resene Paua is a backbone for the home's colour scheme. The couple decided to use colour to create individual spaces in the home. "It's a small house, but you feel like you have identified rooms with a different atmosphere or feeling in each."

In the perfectly cluttered living room, the Resene Paua wall stops and Resene Wasabi begins, a fresh green that is accidentally a "very close relation" to the home's Resene Rain Forest exterior.

Val's love of colour isn't limited to paint. Her passion for textiles is put to good use in everything from bright retro cushions to bold hand-painted curtains and vintage burnt orange carpet. Her own outfits complete the package, with bright colour and pattern from head to toe.

It is through fabric that Val exercises her art, forging the most amazing creations out of apparently mundane materials, using the 'womanly arts' of knitting, crochet and felt, stuffing and stitching.

Her latest exhibition Do Make/Make Do was all about using the ordinary to make the extraordinary, with knitted and crocheted couches, miniature and fragile tents with knitting needle poles, tiny woollen jerseys and her wonderful fabric sculptures, many of which were created to represent the role models she wished she had as a child in 1950s London. "I wish I had heard Mum belly laugh, drink gin and dance on the table," she said in an exhibition blurb discussing the confines of many women's lives back then.

Sitting on one bookshelf in her living room is Jan, a 'freewheeling' alternative woman from the role-model series. On a nearby table Brenda and Bev, two middle-aged women in bright lipstick and fingernails, show their stuff. "The story is they go to the singles dance together. They need each other for support but they are in competition with each other," says Val.

The coffee table is strewn with sketches and her upstairs studio is geared for future creations. "That's partly thanks to the home. Being in a space that you feel really good about is conducive to more creativity, I think."

words: Sophie Preece
pictures: Tim Cuff