My favourite artwork: River painting evokes feelings of home

Events and marketing professional Nicki van Asch is a woman with an interesting job who has also enjoyed success in her own creative endeavours. Her favourite artwork is a painting that she connects with on multiple levels. Nicki speaks with Matt Lawrey about the painting and what it means to her.

When Nicki van Asch looks at her favourite artwork, she gets a very strong sense of home.

The abstract painting by her friend, Nelson artist Georgina Hoby Scutt, is titled Maitai River in Summer,and for the last seven years Nicki and her family have loved living next to the Maitai.

“As a piece of work, it’s beautiful and undeniably Georgie, but it also evokes a sense of place that Nelsonians know so well. Nelson wasn’t home for me, but it is now. Being able to call a place home is an important thing for all of us,” she says.

Nicki’s connection with the Maitai River and seeing her three children grow up with it echoes her own childhood, growing up on a farm next to the Awatere River in Marlborough.

“It was an amazing, idyllic country lifestyle, and it’s a beautiful river. Summers were spent in and around rivers. The smell of damp river stones in summer is my favourite smell on earth. Swimming with ponies and friends in the river was a big part of my childhood. I think that connection lives on in my relationship to the Maitai.”

Nicki and her then husband Mark bought the painting at an exhibition at The Suter Art Gallery in 2019.

“Mark decided we should buy one and said, ‘choose one.’ It wasn’t hard, this one just spoke to me. I love the colour palette Georgie has chosen for this work and the sense of time and place it evokes.”

With a home full of art, Nicki says the way she has collected artworks over the years is similar to the way she lives her life.

“It’s not so much an intentional curation; it’s just a feeling, an aesthetic chemistry not dissimilar to when you meet someone new you feel like you’ve known for far longer. A lot of the pieces of art that have found their way into my life are connected with an experience, a place, or a meaningful event.”

Nicki is an artist in her own right, something she quickly tries to downplay.

“I get a lot of pleasure out of making art, but I’m not an artist in the same way we talk of Georgie as an artist,” she laughs.

A multiple World of WearableArt winner, Nicki has entered WOW four times and been named a winner three of those times. One entry took out the People’s Choice Award, and another won the New Zealand Design Award.

Nicki then went from wearable art to ceramic sculpture and has always dabbled in textiles. She’s just joined the Nelson Pottery Society and is currently working on a series of hats and headpieces for a private garden exhibition in Marlborough.

Nicki started her professional life thinking she was going to be a landscape architect but changed direction after her first undergraduate degree in Resource Studies at Lincoln University. She was one of the first graduates of the (then) new Post Graduate Diploma in Event Management at Christchurch Institute of Technology, a move that has led to over 20 years of working in the industry. Nicki has worked in the sector in Wellington and the UK, and for the last decade has been working with local firm OnCue.

It’s a job that has seen her organise and run a wide range of often “abstract and niche” events and conferences. For example, earlier this year she ran the Asia Pacific Tree Climbing Championship in Kuantan, Malaysia.

“That was pretty exciting, solving problems and delivering events in an entirely different culture and environment,” she said.

A couple of years ago, she travelled to the USA to successfully bid for New Zealand to host the International Society of Arboriculture’s 2025 Annual International Conference. As a result, Nicki will be working on the conference that will bring 1200 arborists to Christchurch’s Te Pae Convention Centre next year, as well as helping to run the International Tree Climbing Championships at the nearby Christchurch Botanic Gardens.

“My work life is a little bit more structured than my creations. Being dynamic, project-based work, however, means solving problems on the trot, which offers plenty of opportunities to exercise the creative corners of the mind,” she laughs.

“I love my work. I really do.”