Richmond artist Maggy J has turned months of recovery from a serious head injury into a creative journey, using wool, fibre and hundreds of hours of hand stitching to produce her latest WoolOn Creative Fashion Event collection.
The long-running Alexandra competition, which celebrates New Zealand wool in fashion, will see Maggy’s designs to the runway again on Saturday continuing a creative relationship that has earned her awards over the years.
After suffering a serious head injury, Maggy spent months struggling to find words, read, cope with crowds, noise and bright lights. Socially isolated, she turned to crochet and repetitive handwork as part of her recovery.
That recovery journey helped inspire her 2024 WoolOn entry, which featured an intricate knitted and crocheted brain and became a finalist. She also won the event's Pink plaster challenge through a collaboration with fellow artist Mary Q.
This year's collection continues her exploration of wool, sustainability and the environment.
Originally planning to create costumes linked to rural New Zealand, including pinafores and traditional farming attire, the concept evolved into a collection of three high-fashion outfits.
While the designs remain under wraps until they are revealed on the runway, the collection is titled The End Game.
"I thought that really what we need to factor into all of our fashion, all of our lives is where is this going to end up, and what can be done with it? Can it be reused again? And it is a bit like a game of trying to outwit nature of reality."
The key material in the garments was destined to be a compostable mulch mat from North Island company Wool.Life, which repurposes leftover wool from sheep like the dags, and anything left on the floor. Unitl Maggy got a hold of it to continue it’s life.
"It's terribly messy and I adore it."
Competition rules require at least 75% of each outfit to be made from wool.
Maggy says the repetitiveness of hand stitching thousands of times helped focus her mind during both the creative process and her recovery.
She began work on the collection at the start of the year and laughs off any attempt to calculate the time invested.
"Don't ask me how many hundreds of hours I've spent.
"That's the nature of the beast, and so I had a wonderful challenge, and it was something that I could just sit and do inside, outside, in the car."
Fashion has long been part of Maggy's life. She has made bridal gowns and a wide range of special occasion wear before moving into art, sculpture and painting.
Her 60th birthday present to herself, more than a decade ago, was enrolling in a two-year Master of Fine Arts degree.
"So, I was no longer an oil painter and a direct stone or bronze sculptor. I put that aside and I basically went back to my childhood, where I would use remnant bits of fabric I found, old clothes that I'd cut up and make clothes for my dolly to start off with, but then for myself, and so fashion has always been foremost."
Her art practice now focuses heavily on environmental issues, sustainability and social themes.
"I'm trying to take lots of things with my art practice, and one is to create work out of basically things that haven't been factored to have an afterlife, and they're clogging up our whole environment and polluting it. So it's addressing those issues and the things that we can all do to improve it."
WoolOn has become a launchpad for emerging designers, with some former entrants progressing to New Zealand Fashion Week. The sold-out Alexandra event returns on Saturday, 29 August.
