craftworker, came to Sydney in 1899 after seven years teaching wood-carving, leather-work and pyrography (pokerwork) in Dunedin, New Zealand. A native of Denmark, she had studied woodcarving and other crafts in Denmark and undertaken further weaving instruction in Switzerland. During her early years in Sydney she held classes in the Queen Victoria Building in George Street, then established a more substantial studio in St James Chambers, King Street, where she expanded her professional options by adding weaving on a Danish loom to her repertoire. Her only known surviving weavings are both in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Gether gave tuition in a variety of crafts, including woodcarving, pyrography, metal work, weaving and embossed and tooled leatherwork. She was astonished to find that in both Dunedin and Sydney woodcarving was 'practically unknown as a useful and interesting pastime for ladies’, whereas in Denmark such an occupation had 'long been recognised as a proper pastime for the highest lady in the land’. She actively encouraged young women to escape the dissatisfaction of 'merely paying calls and drinking afternoon tea’ and took pride in the fact that the NSW Applied Art contribution to the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition at Melbourne disproved the idea that Sydney girls could do no more than dress well. By the time of the exhibition, woodcarving, in particular, had become the pastime or profession of many women. Gether’s participation in the trade section at the exhibition was a clear assertion that she was operating a business.
A star NSW exhibit in the 1907 exhibition was the dining-room suite Gether designed, executed by Gether and sixty-two of her pupils and fellow members of the Arts and Crafts Society, including Mary White . The Sydney Mail noted that Miss Gether had organised a 'regiment’ of woodcarvers and leatherworkers to make the carved rosewood table and six chairs with elaborately embossed Australian leather upholstery. Each woman paid ten shillings towards the cost of the materials. After being shown non-competitively in Melbourne, the suite was sent on London and shown in the NSW Court at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition ( see Muriel Binney ). A surviving chair in Mary White’s former home, Saumarez, Armidale NSW, has several names poker-worked or stamped onto it: Mrs Brooke-Moore, Mrs F Dalton, M. Campbell, Smith, Mrs Dowling, Mrs Davison, Miss E Russell Glasson (twice), Mrs and Miss A Stewart and Miss Frieda White.
Suzanne Gether actively worked to raise the status of women’s work in craft through her teaching and as a founding member of the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts. Early meetings of the Society were held in her studio. Membership grew from eight in 1906 to sixty-five in 1908, the standard of work being elevated by a selective entry requirement for the annual exhibitions. She strongly encouraged women to work in the crafts, not merely to enhance their homes but as a means of providing useful and economically productive employment. Despite the inexperience of Sydney home industry art workers, she felt certain that Sydney women craftworkers would 'soon be able to rival their sisters on the other side of the world’. However, she appears to have sold her studio in 1913 and nothing is known of her after this.
PORTRAIT: illustrated article on the Arts and Crafts Society of NSW has a photograph of Miss Gether, 'whose studio was at the disposal of the Arts and Crafts Society for the first year’ (article contains lots of patronising misinformation from Ethel Stephens, 'the moving spirit of the Arts and Crafts Society’ [sic]).
- Writers:
- Giacco, Louise
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
