Tanya Ashken

English born and bred she may be but for more than six decades, Tanya Ashken has been recognised in her adopted home of New Zealand as one of the country’s foremost contemporary artists. A sculptor and silversmith of national and international renown, Tanya traces her passion for the creative arts back to her days as a student at Dunhurst and Bedales, where she was able to overcome the barrier of the hearing impediment that had been hers since birth. She has been inspired by Brancusi and Jean Arp and received widespread critical appreciation but for Tanya, her debt to Bedales is incalculable. “Bedales made me what I am”, she declares.

World War II was just a few months away when Tanya Ashken was born and inevitably, the outbreak of global hostilities had a considerable effect on her early years.

“My father was a doctor and joined up early in the war with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Tanya reflects. “That meant I didn’t actually meet him until I was something like three or four years old. The rest of the family and I lived in Mill Hill, near London – my mother, a nanny and my big brother Michael Ashken (1938-48), who was eight years older than me. Michael was at school at Dunhurst during the war years so again, I only have the vaguest early memories of him.”

Tanya’s somewhat solitary start to life was accentuated by a relative lack of contact with children her own age. “I do remember riding my tricycle around the place with one childhood friend who lived nearby but she was three years older than me”, she remembers. “With one exception, I don’t think I met another child of about my age until I started kindergarten and school when I was four. That exception was a visit from Susan Kremer (1948-56), whose father had known mine since they were together at medical school. Friends since before we were born, you might say!”

Before the end of the war, Tanya’s father returned home, having been invalided out of the army and it wasn’t long before he realised that something was amiss with his daughter’s hearing. “My hearing impairment had been with me since birth but World War II was not the best time to do anything about it; London was still being bombed and so I carried on with my early schooling as best I could”, Tanya explains.

It was 1946 before Tanya saw the place that would become her educational home for the next several years. “That summer, we went down to Dunhurst to watch a performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which was being performed by Bedalians on the front lawn”, she says. “Some Dunhurstians were fairies, David Wheatcroft (1943-48) was Puck and my brother Michael was the ‘stage’ manager for the production. I remember being pretty impressed, as I was when I saw Bedales itself for the first time. That was mainly to go and see Michael, who I found in the Biology lab, dissecting a frog! Science was Michael’s strength – he later went on to become a urological surgeon.”

At any place other than Dunhurst, Tanya’s hearing difficulties might have resulted in an education that was restricted to a school specifically for deaf children. “I was very lucky – in the first place, my father didn’t tell Dunhurst that I had a problem!” she reveals. "On my very first night there, Amy ‘Tarkie’ Clarke (staff, 1918-54), the headmistress of the day, rang him up and said that she thought I may be hard of hearing. My father agreed but pointed out that I had been accepted by the school and was therefore now Dunhurst’s responsibility, which was rather amazing."

Numerous teachers from Tanya’s years at Dunhurst and Bedales receive her unstinting praise for their efforts on her behalf: “Edward Messingham (staff, 1923-63), who taught Woodwork, and his wife, Mary Messingham (née Cocker, staff, 1925-64) who was Miss Cocker for most of my time at school, were both very important,” she says. “Mrs M was a brilliant teacher but she also insisted that I wouldn’t be allowed into her class until I got a hearing aid – I suppose I would have been about 11 at the time. Being in the workshop and making presents for my family out of wood was one of my favourite activities. I also loved the Barn with Miss E O Cormack ‘Cor’ (staff, 1929-72), where we all tried to make things out of fabric, even though I was never very good at sewing!”

“Another teacher who made a big difference to my life was Rachel Cary Field (staff, 1941-75), such an inspiration for Drama”, Tanya continues. “She gave me special speech lessons, which mostly consisted of learning wonderful extracts from Shakespeare plays. Along with Rachel, Harold Gardiner (staff, 1952-68), a fantastic English teacher, gave me a love of English Literature that never left me. It was the only subject I took at A Level.”

The workshop, however, continued to be the central focus of Tanya’s ‘classroom’ existence throughout her life at school. “I don’t think I was any different from anyone else making wooden or metal things”, she says. “I just enjoyed the process and it became my passion at Bedales. Harry ‘Biff’ Barker (1922-46) was my inspirational teacher, always encouraging my interest, and I was eventually allowed to drop the girls’ domestic Science classes and join the boys in the workshop. Most of the boys (and the girls who turned up at the workshop in their spare time) were making things out of copper – I got into the habit of creating things out of silver. That was mainly because my parents had their silver wedding anniversary in 1953 but it led to a governor at Bedales, who happened to be a member of the Goldsmiths’ Hall, suggesting that I should get a hallmark for my work.”

Tanya, who was just 13 at the time she was awarded her silversmithing hallmark, became something of a Bedalian path-finder in her favourite discipline. “There were a couple of boys who made silver bowls and got their hallmarks too”, she recalls, “and the Goldsmiths’ Hall decided to award Bedales its own hallmark, which could then in theory be used by any student. I don’t actually know whether it was ever used before Biff Barker left, but I do know that afterwards the metalwork that we had learned from him wasn’t taught any more. Recently I had the mad idea of trying to reinstate the Bedales hallmark but unfortunately it seems that it’s not a real possibility.”

Looking back at her Bedales life still fills Tanya with a sense of her own good fortune. “I didn’t really understand the privileges I was given at the time or how lucky I was to live in such beautiful countryside where I first developed my love of birds and birdwatching”, she says. “My parents, for example, were allowed to come down and visit me every two or three weeks instead of the normal two long weekends for everyone else at Dunhurst and Bedales. I was also able to take a friend out with me each time, which meant that lots of my friends got to know my parents well.”

A number of Tanya’s Bedales friendships have endured down the decades. “Oh yes, I still have a few of those friends left, although of course and very sadly, others are no longer with us”, she says. “One boy, Robert Winnicott (1948-56), and I used to go alone on long Sunday walks from Dunhurst all over the countryside, I remember. Would such young children be allowed to do that now?! There are four of us who have recently been writing about what we remember from when we first met at seven or eight years old and we’ve realised that we know each other better than anyone else, even though our lives and careers are completely different. Those are such formative years and they stay with you forever.”

Tanya’s passion and gifts for the creative arts that she had honed at Bedales were a pointer to her life after school. On leaving Bedales, she attended the Central School of Art & Craft, where she studied silversmithing for three years and met a man who would change her life forever. “Central was great fun and I met a number of what you might call colonials in those days – there were a lot of people from Canada, South Africa and New Zealand there, as well as others from Ireland, Greece and India”, Tanya reflects. 

Tanya and John married in 1960 in Steep Church, for which she would later design a Cross that now hangs just to the left of the main entrance in what was the church’s Lady Chapel altar, "It represents chaos and peace". The couple then decamped to Paris for a year, where Tanya decided to change her focus from silversmithing to sculpture. “Paris was another eye-opener,” Tanya admits. “I found a little atelier in the Impasse Ronsin, near where we lived, which was run by a M. Del Debbio and where I discovered that the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi had lived and worked. He had died in 1957 but his studio was still there, as were a lot of his sculptures.   I clambered up on the big pile of marble outside his studio, peered down from the high windows into his studio and my life changed at that moment! There were his sculptures, beautifully arranged, and Brancusi, along with Jean Arp, became my only inspiration.”

Eventually, it was decided that Tanya and John would live and work in New Zealand. Tanya does not pretend that this was initially a decision that thrilled her: “I wasn’t at all sure that living in New Zealand in the 1960s would be a good thing, creatively or otherwise”, she says. “Back then it was, to be frank, a rather dull place that somehow seemed to have become suspended in a vacuum for many years. In the end, I had to decide which I would miss more – John or Europe. The man won!”

It is fair to say that Tanya’s life and career since moving to New Zealand have been filled with the most extraordinary variety and success. Her oeuvre over more than 60 years has included numerous silversmithing and jewellery commissions, as well as sculptural works constructed in steel and cement, carved stone and wood, wire and plaster of Paris works cast in bronze. Tanya’s work is represented in collections and public spaces around New Zealand and her adopted country recently gave tangible form to its appreciation of one of its most distinguished citizens by awarding Tanya the ONZM in the King’s Birthday Honours list (the equivalent of the OBE in Britain).

Tanya comments illuminatingly on her artistic muse: 

Of the silversmithing that has now been a part of her life for around 70 years, Tanya is equally fascinating: “I have been able to carry on with silversmithing, getting quite a few commissions mainly in Church silver. My old teachers from London days were quite impressed when on one visit back, I showed them some photos, although they did also tell me that they were relieved not to have needed to find me a job in the trade because I was a girl. I think the truth is I always was and still am, unknowingly and latently non-binary. That is the most obvious explanation to me of the life that I have led all along.”  

The Bedales girl has come a long way and not just geographically but Tanya still feels a great kinship with her old school. “Bedales made me what I am”, she says simply. “My two sons, Tony and Cameron, always used to get fed up with me talking about it all the time and insisting that other forms of education were all inferior so last year, our family, eight of us, visited England and I brought them down to see the school for themselves.”

And what was the result of Tanya’s powers of persuasion? “The outcome is that my grandson is going to start in 6.1 (Year 12) in September this year”, she reports happily. “I think that’s quite fantastic!”

Tanya Ashken was interviewed by James Fairweather in Summer 2024