By Mary Marshall 4 March, 2026
ZENA ABBOTT April 1922 – November 1993 was a New Zealand weaver and a Blockhouse Bay resident. Her works are held at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Dowse Art Museum. She was born in Auckland in 1922. Growing up in Depression-era New Zealand. Zena left school at the age of thirteen to become a dressmaker, and was subsequently drafted into essential work during World War Two. During the 1950s, she travelled around New Zealand, living in a caravan and working as a sewing machine instructor. She would leave Auckland with a van full of sewing machines and return loaded with fleeces and lichens.
She first studied weaving with fellow Blockhouse Bay resident: German-born weaver Ilse von Randow at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1952. Zena acquired her own loom and began experimenting with unspun wool and natural dyes and fibres. Her first piece of weaving, a finger twisted rug, sold within 3 hours of arriving at New Vision gallery.
In 1959, her work was shown in the Auckland City Art Gallery in An Exhibition of New Zealand Craft Work, alongside artists such as Len Castle. In her work Zena used natural and artificial dyes, and materials ranging from art silk and flax fibre to alkathene piping and burglar alarm tape. From the late 1950s she became interested in ’extending the traditional boundaries of weaving into three- dimensional constructions’. In 1958 Zena opened a professional handweaving studio in Blockhouse Bay, Auckland. This was an A-Frame building, unusual for those times. The building is still standing in Terry Street.
From the studio she ran a small-scale commercial operation, teaching and employing several women. Mary Marshall’s mother Betty was one of those women and Mary recalls her mother was never able to walk by an interesting piece of lichen or moss. It had to be scraped off and taken to the studio - you never knew what colour or tint could come from it. At its peak she employed 7 weavers with two out workers. Zena sold her work through craft shops and galleries throughout New Zealand. She exported her work to Australia, and exhibited in Australia, England, Canada and the United States.
In 1968, Zena was one of the founding members of Brown’s Mill Market, New Zealand’s first craft co- operative, located in an old flour mill in Durham Lane, Auckland. In 1986 her work was featured in
Elizabeth Eastmond and Merimeri Penfold’s book Women and the Arts in New Zealand - Forty Works: 1936-86: the work the authors chose to reproduce was Scrolls (1980), a large sculptural piece made up of a triptych of wall hangings and two large woven scrolls placed on the floor, which viewers were encouraged to unroll to reveal the woven text ‘From thorny plants the hidden fibre’, which referenced the sisal derived from cactus plants which was one of her favourite materials. In 2019 to 2020 the Dowse held an exhibition of her work called Zena Abbott & Emma Fitts: Nomads.
Ian Spalding wrote of her: “By her work with the Handweavers Guild and the New Zealand chapter of the World Crafts Council, by her generous sharing of techniques and by her continuing help and encouragement Zena Abbott has been an inspiration to hundreds of weavers and has made an inestimable contribution to the development of the craft in N.Z.”
By Mary Marshall