Cassette 5: Van Gogh Museum (1977)

The childhood works of Claudia Atieno, featured in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Introduction by Lia Bakker, director of curation.

> *"You see the young artist grasp the concept of the viewer, the patron. She looks skeptical, distrustful. This picture isn’t about children playing hoops, it’s about your response to it. Is she trying to intimidate us? Do you feel challenged to enjoy or critique this work? Do you feel your concept grasped by the artist? Do you have a response?"*
>
>

Other artists featured in this series of exhibitions discussing their childhood work were asked to comment personally, but because of Claudia's disappearance, Roimata Mangakāhia was asked instead. In her opening comments, she emphasises that childhood works in reality do very little to inform the art of the grown artist.

She also mentions that it is remarkable that these early works survived, considering that Claudia was born at the end of the Great Reckoning and the world changed rapidly and intensely as she grew up. She was part of the last generation to be raised by her parents, and was not made to forget them. Her mother saved a great deal of her art up to the age of twelve, at which point she was moved to a Programming Centre and the record of her work becomes more sparse - possibly because she made less art, she personally kept less art, or because the centre could not keep everything that every child ever produced.

## Childhood Home, 1935

In the once-common childhood style, the house sits on a flat green line and appears as a box with brown walls, windows, and a yellow front door. There is a chimney stack on top with clouds pouring out, and the sky is represented by a single line of blue at the top of the picture. Roimata compares the drawing to Atieno's painting 'House with Yellow Door' which depicts the same house and reminds the listener not to look for skill in this picture that isn't there. The childhood version also includes Atieno's family standing outside; her parents, siblings, and dog. Roimata makes a comment about Claudia looking at what the other children were drawing, and copying that.

## Childhood Home, Left

Done in watercolour while Claudia was a teenager at the Programming Centre, about seven years after the original, this version of the drawing is much more recognisable as the same house from 'House with Yellow Door'. The siding of the house is yellow wood, and the space around it is filled with bicycles and a swing-set. This time, the family dog is absent - Roimata weighs up the possibilities of the dog dying, or just the memory of it. She suggests that this is how Claudia imagined the home as still existing without her, despite the fact that her brothers and sisters were also removed to Programming Centres, and her parents left alone.

## New Environments

A collection of twelve tiny drawings (in two rows of six) depicting parts of the Programming Centre including the gardens, courtyard, recreation areas, dining rooms, and dormitories, many with a theme of personal distance. The drawings all show a collection of children with caretakers hovering around them as they play, study, and eat. In order, they depict: relaxation exercises in the garden, eating breakfast in the dining hall, recieving instructions from the loudspeakers, classroom education, isolation room, physical education, lunch, musical lessons, two panels of tactile re-training involving wires attached to their arms, and then three panels of children talking during class breaks in the garden.

Claudia herself is shown in all of the panels, with her sharp slight frame and long braids, but she is never included in the activity. In the panel of PE class, two of the children appear to be holding hands, which Roimata believes suggests young romance in a place that forbade it. The two girls also appear to be whispering covertly in the garden, and one of them looks similar to Claudia but has a larger build.

Second from the right on the bottom row, there is a drawing in which Claudia stands in the middle, staring blankly out at the viewer, while she is surrounded by children playing with hoops in no particular direction. To Roimata, this is the only indication in Claudia's early work that she might go on to become a great artist - engaging with the relationship between the subject and the viewer.

## Self-Portraits Sketchbook

The sketchbook was filled when Claudia was between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, in her final years at the Centre. It is comprised entirely of self-portraits in varying scopes, details, and stages of completion. As an adult artist, she did not to many self-portraits as she did not like them and did not care to explain why to Roimata. Roimata highlights three of the self-portraits in particular that are worth commenting on.

### Page 10

A plain pencil sketch with energy to the face, but not a strong expression. Roimata likens it to an expression she has seen on the adult Claudia, when she told her that as a child she used to pin down and study moths, flies, and other insects in the garden around the Programming Centre. Rather than kill the damselflies, she would tear off their wings, watch them crawl away, and then blow the wings into the wind like seed pods. Roimata had asked why children did such cruel things, and she had responded that she didn't think it cruel at all. The expression in the self-portrait is the same one she wore when she said, "I still do it from time to time, Roimata."

### Page 13

This piece is done in pastels and is more fantastical, with her brown skin depicted in reds and blues, and green eyes tinted yellow. Her hair is extremely colourful, and Roimata likened the style to one from a children's book that she had had since leaving her family, that she stopped herself from naming.

### Back Cover

Done in pen and ink on the pale green card cover, the left half of her face is impassive and the right half is shattered away below the right eye. It looks very similiar to the self-portrait done by Aimee Layeni which currently hangs in the LA County Museum in Los Angeles, North America, and which was unveiled when Claudia was in her early twenties - they were almost the same age. Layeni looked similar to Claudia except for her larger build, rounder face, and lack of glasses. Roimata recalls that Claudia once mentioned how she missed Aimee, and when she remarked that she didn't know they knew one another and asked when she had last seen her, Claudia said she "couldn't say." She had not mentioned this sketch or the Programming Centre at the time.