It was January 2012 when architect William Smart answered a phone call from Judith Neilson. He had worked with the Zimbabwean turned Sydneysider years earlier, designing the $10 million White Rabbit Gallery she opened in Chippendale in 2009 to exhibit her Chinese art collection. Neilson had since bought the old Simona factory a stone’s throw away from White Rabbit, and had plans for it.
“She asked me what I was doing and if I was busy,” recalls Smart over coffee at his eponymous Surry Hills architectural practice. “She said she wanted me to build a new house for her, and that she wanted it to be the best house in Sydney. She said if I was too busy she’d call Frank Gehry.”
That last bit was a joke, but only in part. Gehry had been to White Rabbit and was designing a new wing for the University of Technology Sydney, just down the road. He and Neilson had already met a couple of times.
Neilson had the funds to employ such an architect, should she wish; she and then husband Kerr Neilson had become billionaires in 2007 when his Platinum Asset Management listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
“I hung up the phone and knew this had been the phone call you might wait your whole life for,” Smart says with a smile. “This was the opportunity to do something great.”
One for the books
The following Saturday Smart arrived on Neilson’s doorstep with three books: one on the minimalist British architect John Pawson, another on French interior designer Christian Liaigre, and a third on Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza.
“They each had a different position, and I wanted to get a sense of what kind of aesthetic she was after,” Smart says. “She immediately went for Siza.” Siza is known for his use of concrete, for homes that are sculptures as much as dwellings. Smart and his client had a stylistic starting point.
Neilson, meanwhile, had drawn up a list of requirements. It was only a page long, but very specific. The house would be called Indigo Slam. It would have brick floors. It would have a long dining room for events. There would be nothing operated by fancy electronics. Under no circumstances would there be curtains. And it had to be built to survive a century.
“I said I have to be able to work everything on my own, everything must open and shut manually,” recalls Neilson. “And it has to last 100 years. If this house goes up it stays up, nobody must tamper with it.” As for the curtains edict: “I just can’t stand them. Cannot. Stand. Them. They date a place.”
Stairs fit for a horse
Neilson later added other requests, including that her new home feature a staircase “you could ride a horse up”. It wasn’t that she would, necessarily – although with Neilson, anything’s possible. Rather, she wanted the gentle gradient found in many European chateaus. Considered to have the perfect stair proportion, these were built for chevaliers to ascend.
At least one brass bell was to be thrown into every concrete pour as the house was being built, and a copy of the book Indigo Slam was to be buried at the front door. An airport thriller by American writer Robert Crais, the book had inspired the moniker. Not the content of the book, mind, which Neilson still hasn’t read. Just the name.
“I was reading one of his books and wondered what else he’d written so had a look, and saw one called Indigo Slam,” she says. “Who writes a book called Indigo Slam? Indigo is a nice word, a good colour, and slam is so definite. I loved it.”
Neilson moved into her new home earlier this year.
Not to everyone's taste
Indigo Slam dominates its Chippendale streetscape, a bold concrete and steel statement opposite the park that separates White Rabbit from Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, and will not please those who lament the gentrification of this once gritty inner Sydney suburb. But those who approve of it include the judges of the Australian Institute of Architects’ Wilkinson Award for NSW residential architecture, which it won in June.
Notable aspects include its green credentials, from solar roof panels and geothermal heating to windows and shutters that control the light and air flow via manual brass winders. It has an extensive underground wine cellar, a corten steel gate, and an aluminium, brass and glass front door that weighs, literally, a tonne. The ground floor dining room seats 60 and has a commercial kitchen, cool room, loading area and guest bathrooms. The upstairs dining area seats 24.
The grand staircase was built with a view to hanging art all the way up it, but that wasn’t to be. “You can’t do it, the building is too strong, it would look ridiculous,” says Neilson. “We brought it here and took it all away again and put it back in storage.”
The house is up for a host of other awards in the coming months, both here and overseas, including the AIA’s national award for new homes, the winner of which will be announced on November 3. More importantly though, the woman it was created for adores it.
“I especially love it when I’m here on my own,” Neilson says with emotion. “It’s gorgeous, all this light comes in. At night, there are all these people walking around outside, but in here you feel so safe.”
A woman not to be underestimated
Neilson is a striking woman, with blue eyes and a thick mane of grey hair; she seems to have got subtly but distinctly more glamorous since her divorce in recent years from Kerr. She has a warm but awkward manner, one that suggests her mind works in quirky, non-linear ways, and that small talk and social niceties are neither her forte nor her interest.
Like so many of her generation, especially those who raised the children while their husbands worked, she’s the kind of woman who could be underestimated. Yet over the past seven years, Neilson has built one of Australia’s most interesting privately owned public art galleries, all the more impressive because it’s dedicated to a single kind of art, that created in China from the year 2000 onwards. Two free exhibitions are curated each year from her collection, which runs into the thousands of pieces and covers about 650 artists.
“The reason I collect contemporary Chinese art is there are more artists, good and bad, in China than there have been anywhere in history,” Neilson says. “I couldn’t go to New York and start a collection and hope to get even 100 artists.”
With no paid advertising (but lots of media coverage), the audience for White Rabbit has grown organically, such that a gallery that began opening Thursday to Sunday now starts the week on a Wednesday, and hit a record 55,000 visitors with its show in the first half of this year. Opening nights have typically meant queues out the door and around the corner, and on weekends, particularly in the early years, Neilson could often be found decked out in one of White Rabbit’s colourful pinafores, talking with visitors about the art on display.
An audience to die for
Those visitors are of the kind many arts organisations would kill for: young people, and Chinese people, although Neilson says the latter took a while to realise they were welcome. “They didn’t understand anybody could come. Now they come and they are so proud.” Couples who get married at the “hatches, matches and dispatches” registry around the corner often end up in White Rabbit’s Tea House, sharing a dumpling while a staff member plays the ukulele.
Like David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, it’s hard to believe now that there was ever any doubt about White Rabbit’s appeal. But success was by no means a certainty, reminds Edmund Capon, the former director of the Art Gallery of NSW, who opened the gallery in 2009.
“There was concern about how the public would react, whether they would come. These things can take a while to lodge in the public psyche,” Capon says. “Now it’s absolutely established in the public mind. I think Judith’s initiative, unbridled enthusiasm and commitment has made a lot of people think, not about just what contemporary China is but about what individual patronage can do for a community.”
Many wealthy collectors have surprisingly uniform taste in art, collecting the artists dealers tell them are worth collecting. Not so Neilson. Most of the artists she buys are not well known, from those in White Rabbit to the Russian painting bolted to the wall of her new downstairs dining room, the proportions of which had to be altered to accommodate it.
“I don’t care who did a work or what it means – everything I collect is about the visual,” she says. “With White Rabbit I wanted people to be able to walk in and not be told that they had to like something because it was by so and so.”
Taking tea with Judith
We’re sitting in the upstairs lounge room at Indigo Slam, sipping mango tea from lairy floral cups and saucers given to Neilson by her friend, Shanghai restaurateur Michelle Garnaut. The M on the Bund founder initially gave Neilson half a dozen cups; when she saw the size of the dining tables at Indigo Slam she had another box sent across. There’s a low coffee table in front of us on which sit pieces Neilson’s collected on her travels, many from China, which she’s visited every few months for the past decade.
Neilson’s two Chihuahuas, Cumin and Wasabi, are in penitentiary in an adjoining room, while her assistant Neil trains them to be less excitable in their new home. Neilson got them not long after moving out of the McMahon’s Point home she shared with Kerr. Her then dog, Saffron, had just died. “I said I’m not getting another dog,” she recalls. “That lasted about two weeks.” She calls them the Spice Girls.
Neilson is right about the light in Indigo Slam: it’s beautiful, softly diffused through a large concrete tube that gives the house its unmistakable presence. There are cranes outside the windows, and the thrum of jackhammers provides a dull soundtrack to the afternoon. Doesn’t the racket annoy her?
“I don’t mind the noise because in two years’ time it won’t be there,” she says. “And it’s because of the noise that we’re getting something wonderful.”
The jackhammers are at work on Phoenix, the building next door which Neilson is turning into a $41 million, 120-seat performance space and art gallery. It’s not her only building project. Around the corner she’s creating a new family office. And in Alexandria, the concrete has been poured for Dangrove, a 10,000-square-metre, state-of-the-art storage facility that will house the White Rabbit collection. It’s estimated to be costing between $30 million and $50 million.
An influential neighbour
It’s hard to think of another private individual who has such a diverse but interconnected group of cultural building projects under way, nor one who is making such a tangible difference to the built environment – and property values – of a single Sydney suburb. The result is that some of the country’s best architects and designers are working for Neilson, separately but concurrently. Just as she’s mostly bought only one or two pieces by each of the artists in her collection, so Neilson is spreading out her architectural commissions.
Smart did White Rabbit and Indigo Slam; Alec Tzannes is designing Dangrove; Tim Greer is doing the family office. Neil Durbach and Camilla Block are doing the performing arts side of Phoenix, John Wardle the gallery half of that project.
“It’s the breadth of what Judith is doing, running these projects simultaneously, each distinctively different, that’s extraordinary,” says Wardle. “Also quite commendable is the manner in which she’s commissioning. There’s a remarkable bridge of trust. She has a really interesting way of engaging architects, akin to the way an artist would get a commission.”
Durbach has had a similar experience, noting that Neilson, “knows when to let you run and when to say this is where you should focus”. He expands on the theme. “The worst kind of client lets you do whatever you want, there are no edges. The other extreme are clients who tell you that they saw something in a magazine and want something exactly like that. With Judith, it’s a much more elastic relationship.”
Inside Indigo Slam
Adelaide furniture designer Khai Liew has been working full-time for Neilson for four years and expects to do so for another two, employing eight full-time staff and using up to 30 artisans to bring his designs to life. He conceived of every piece of furniture in Indigo Slam, from the dining tables made from two giant pieces of wood Neilson had shipped back from China, to her four-poster bed, to the lighting and the Robyn Cosgrove rugs in muted tones that soften some of the floors. That job done, he’s now co-ordinating the overall design and furniture for Phoenix, which will open in 2018.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says, echoing Smart’s words. “This is the first time anything like this has been done in Australia. It’s our version of Nelson Rockefeller commissioning George Nakashima to make all that furniture for him [more than 150 items] in the 1970s.”
It would be easy to write Neilson off as a rich dilettante with more money than sense. And she has her critics. Those who dislike the fact that she buys directly from artists in China rather than through the gallery system. Those who worry that private collectors have too much power, and are too uncritically feted, in the modern art world. Those who don’t think she has a particularly great eye and that the White Rabbit collection won’t stand the test of time. Those who feel uneasy about the power imbalance of a wealthy white woman buying up big from artists in emerging foreign fields.
With regard to the White Rabbit collection, Neilson happily concedes that the artists in it might not end up being significant. She sees it as a document about what’s happened in China over the past 16 years, which is why she never sells anything.
“If you do sell, then you lose the history. Maybe the second person I bought who I think isn’t that strong, maybe in history they’ll be the one,” she says. “Or maybe the whole thing will only be a document. I don’t know. Contemporary art has no value because it has no history, it’s only fashion.”
Architecture for the dispossessed
Neilson’s commitment to architecture includes a $10 million donation to the University of NSW for a chair to explore better ways to house people displaced by natural disaster, geopolitical conflict and the like. Announced last year, the inaugural chair is Professor David Sanderson, who has worked with international aid agencies for the past 20 years, and undertaken teaching-research stints at Oxford and Harvard.
Sanderson says he doesn’t know of anything similar to the chair, funded for 50 years but expected to be extended into perpetuity, elsewhere in the world. His role is to educate tomorrow’s architects as well as to conduct research. “We want to make architecture relevant to the most marginalised people in the world, to get architects thinking about new ways to use their skills,” he says. “It’s tremendously exciting.”
Tzannes, dean of UNSW’s Faculty of Built Environment, says “that commitment to making a better world through her vision and good fortune is a really important part of Judith”.
One of the first functions Neilson held at Indigo Slam was for Anti-Slavery Australia, a not-for-profit legal research and policy centre at UTS where her daughter Beau works. (The first function she held at Indigo Slam was for the Sydney Biennale, on whose board daughter Paris sits.) For the Anti-Slavery dinner, Neilson invited an eclectic group of 45 individuals, including former NSW premier Bob Carr and former federal immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.
Guests were not asked to donate money, but to consider the stories of four enslaved Australians, as depicted on the night by two actors. Each guest was given a white rabbit puppet at the end of the night. In each rabbit’s mouth was a piece of paper with the name on it of a different worker whose fundamental freedoms had been curtailed. They were meant to be talking points, and they were. “A rabbit doesn’t have a voice, it doesn’t make a sound unless it’s really angry,” Neilson explains. “Everyone was shocked. It was a huge success.”
Why White Rabbit?
When she opened White Rabbit, Neilson said she chose the name because it sounded friendly. But perhaps there was more to it. For if there’s a thread running through her public projects, it’s the desire to create spaces for people without a voice. With White Rabbit she wanted to welcome those who felt shut out or intimidated by the art world. With Phoenix, she wants a venue where emerging artists who have nowhere else to perform can get a gig. “If someone wants to stand in the middle of the floor and hum, that’s fine,” she says.
Dangrove is being built primarily to house the White Rabbit collection, with storage around the edges and giant empty rooms in the middle. But aside from providing space for White Rabbit curators to mock up future shows, Neilson wants to invite art students there to hone their curatorial skills, perhaps to stage their own little exhibitions. She’s talking to a university about this, including making White Rabbit’s extensive library, which will move to Dangrove, available to researchers.
“There’s hardly anywhere for all these new graduates to get the chance to curate,” she says. “No-one wants to take them, it’s expensive to have temps, and it can be a nuisance.”
The anti-slavery and disaster housing programs Neilson is funding are about more extreme dispossession, but there’s a definite thread. When I point this out to her, Neilson brings up 20 Feet from Stardom, the 2013 documentary which turned the spotlight onto American music’s back-up singers. “I thought, that’s what it’s all about,” Neilson says.
Bulawayo backstory
To understand where this empathy with the outsider comes from, it’s worth going back to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – or Rhodesia, as it was known at the time – where Neilson was born and raised. One of four daughters to a father who made car radiators and a mother who grew up in the Kalahari desert then became a teacher, Neilson recalls a happy childhood in which her love of bells was formed when her uncle picked one up that had fallen off a horse and gave it to her.
“I thought that bell was wonderful,” she says. “When I grew up there was no luxury, you never threw away string or ribbons or bags. It was something really nice and I loved looking at it. It made me think of function and shape. I still have it.”
Neilson’s father had done military service in North Africa and Libya, during which he had half his face blown off. Whilst recovering in a hospital in Cairo he was taught tapestry, something he continued with all his life. It fascinated his oldest daughter, who loved drawing and made clothes for everyone.
“People thought I was mad,” she says with a laugh. “I must have been weird, although I didn’t see it until later.”
Colour and composition
When she finished school Neilson moved to Durban, South Africa, where she studied graphic and textile design. “That taught me a lot about colour,” she says. “I’m very good at colour, I can understand how it’s made, what percentage to mix and so on. I didn’t realise how much it was teaching me but looking back, it heavily influenced how I see composition.”
It was here in the mid-1960s that she met the artist Dumile Feni, who has been described as the Goya of South Africa for his ability to depict the pain of those living in black townships during the apartheid era. Acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge cites Feni as a big influence.
“We students met him, hung around him a bit, then he had to leave the country,” Neilson says of Feni. “I felt like God had patted me on the head, to have allowed me to meet him.”
Neilson, meanwhile, was becoming friendly with her housekeeper’s family. “Hearing from her about what was happening in Soweto, I didn’t have money but I’d say this is my rent, take it. And they never let me down. I’m still very close to that family, 40 years later.” That said, she’s only been back to Zimbabwe a handful of times since leaving.
Neilson worked in packaging in Johannesburg for a few years, then in retail, before moving to Australia in 1983 with her new husband Kerr. “We both realised that Africa belonged to the Africans,” she says. “We were starting a family, so we thought it was a good time to leave.”
Discovering Sydney's galleries
Neilson got a job in the graphic design department at Grace Bros, then had her two daughters. She volunteered with the St Vincent de Paul Society when her children were young, helping refugees find housing and other practical things they needed to start with their new lives. Paris says her mother painted when she was young and always had an artistic bent.
“She did some pretty quirky things with us as kids. One Christmas she found some sticks and twigs on the road, did some creative arrangement with them and that was our Christmas tree. Beau and I were bitterly disappointed. Looking back now I think it’s really clever and something I might do too, but at the time, as kids …”
When her daughters were in high school, Neilson and a friend began frequenting Sydney’s contemporary art galleries. It was in a back room at Ray Hughes’ gallery that she first saw the work of contemporary Chinese artist Wang Zhiyuan. “When I saw Wang’s work I thought, I’m seeing Dumile again,” she recalls. It was from here, with Wang as her trusted guide and friend, that she started exploring contemporary Chinese art, collecting the works that led to White Rabbit, the gallery that led to everything else.
When Neilson arrived in Australia she knew no one other than the husband she came with. When she started collecting contemporary Chinese art she was an outsider, too – both in China and in the sometimes cliquey Australian art world.
Today Neilson is the ultimate insider: feted by her artist friends in China, by the Australian arts community and now, by some in the architecture fraternity. Yet those locked out of the system, whatever system that might be, continue to interest her. “I guess that sense of being an outsider is always with those who migrated here,” observes friend Penelope Seidler.
I ask Neilson what she thinks is driving her to undertake all these projects. “I think it’s the privilege of being able to have an idea, and then because of what life has given me, and my circumstances now, to be able to do it. And do it correctly.”
I can’t help but wonder whether she’d like someone new to share it all with. “Oh no, I’m too old,” she says with a laugh, pointing out that she’s fast approaching 70.
And perhaps, too busy – or just too independent at heart.
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The AFR Magazine Design issue, out Friday October 28 inside The Australian Financial Review.
