Shelley Ryde is a well known, highly respected Aotearoa art educator and artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland NZ. 

Shelley has led the visual art department and taught art at Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland, finishing this position in 2024 after 42 years of devotion, hard work, commitment and a lot of love. 

Many young art students and NZ practising artists have been taught and inspired by Shelley, including a number of guests on this podcast who speak so highly of her and her influence.

This is the first part of a 2 part series. In this episode we talk about Shelley's life as an artist and the connections with her important teaching career. She shares her childhood memories, her creative journey and her 50+ years as an artist. Part 2 will be released in the near future and is all about her experiences, reflections and philosophies as an art educator in Aotearoa.

Shelley is a beautiful storyteller. We talk about her childhood on the west coast of the south Island and her family and how those things have influenced her as an artist and a writer. She shares her experience studying at Ilam School of Art in Christchurch in the late sixties, her relationship with her lecturer Rudi Gopas, and her peers at Ilam including Phil Clairmont, Philippa Blair, Chris Booth and Sally Burton. We discuss what Shelley gained from this course and how her work evolved and her early teaching days teaching visual art with Fred Graham. Shelley shares a pivotal opportunity when she won a scholarship to a workshop in New York in 1990 which started her love of printmaking and how that influenced her own practice and her art teaching. 

It is fascinating to hear about her era studying art in the sixties, her experiences, her reflections and the evolution of her work. I know you'll really enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed speaking to Shelley. Be sure to tune in to the second chapter of this 2 part series, coming sometime soon.

The link to Shelley's 146 slide presentation which we mention in our chat is available on her blogpost which is on our blog at creativeconnections.nz Here you can see examples of her work and her poems. Seeing this will enrich and really add to the conversation you're about to hear. I've included her retirement poem on there as well. 

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