FLEUR WICKES

New Zealand Woman’s Weekly,2021

Words: Fleur Guthrie

Photos: Bernadette Peters

After enduring childhood taunts for being ‘ugly’ and cruelly nicknamed ‘bulldog’ by classmates for having a flat nose, Fleur Wickes grew into a teenager who would hide her face when talking to boys.

Born with a full cleft lip and palate - and needing numerous operations to reconstruct her nose and lips out of hip bone - she quietly took on her own brutal self-critique. 

But at 20, Fleur didn’t want to do that anymore and made a decision to look in the mirror every day for a year and tell herself she was beautiful.

“It actually worked!” says the Whanganui-based artist, whose emotive word paintings stem from finding beauty in the dark places.

“One man I dated told me: ‘You’d look really pretty if you didn’t have scars, have you thought about having surgery for them?’ In that moment, I knew all the work I had done in the mirror had helped, because I was able to reply, ‘No, I actually like them.’ I realised how far I had come.”

“Everyone has something to deal with, but a lot of the time it’s hidden. I didn’t have that option.”

Growing up as the youngest of six kids, with parents who ran the local pub at Ūpokongaro, Fleur credits her five-foot-one and fiercely-protective mum, Colleen, with teaching her to stand up for herself.

“My mother was so strong in advocating for me. Until I had my first operation at six-weeks-old, you could see through to the back of my throat. It was completely open. Mum used to push me in my pram down the street and people would peer in and say: ‘You shouldn’t have your baby out in public, she’s really ugly’.

“To compensate, she would make me the most beautiful dresses to wear. And if she didn’t agree with something during my clinic visits at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, she’d get stuck into the plastic surgeon or the speech therapist,” smiles Fleur, who featured in NZ medical journals for being the first patient to have a cleft, lip and palate repaired at the same time. 

“She made sure I put my head up and my shoulders back and not be ashamed of who I was. I always felt extremely loved by my family and that was good for what was yet to come.” 

The 50-year-old is unafraid to talk candidly about being raped by a friend’s father at 16; later becoming an alcoholic and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which occurred around the same time as her marriage ended in 2010.

She remembers one night, after drinking a couple of bottles of wine by herself at home, she picked up her young son, David (now 17), to carry him to the toilet.

“I nearly dropped him.  In that moment, I thought: ‘I’m not keeping my son safe’ and the next morning I went to Alcoholics Anonymous. That was 11 years ago and I’m really proud I haven’t had a drink since.”

Fleur also gave up a successful career as a portrait and wedding photographer to focus on David, and on healing herself. 

“I went from flying around the country for work, living in a beautiful house in Wellington, to moving to Whanganui as a single mum on the DPB and sometimes having to decide between buying bananas or tampons,” she recalls. 

“I had nothing. It was very difficult for a few years. I hadn’t told anyone I was raped nor had I dealt with other things that happened. I just made sure that I drank and worked constantly to numb the pain.

“Then one day it all came out like a tsunami and I couldn’t stop it.”

Sitting at the dining table, Fleur would frequently black out before fainting.  Spending time in public spaces dwindled too, for fear of having more panic attacks. Gradually, with the help of therapy and using art to get her through, she began to see a way forward.

“It’s like that Japanese pottery ‘kintsugi’, where you take ceramics that are fractured and repair it, making it stronger and more beautiful than what it was before. Well I was kintsugi-ing the heck out of myself,” she laughs.

“The gift of any trauma is that you get cracked open and you can experience such beauty if you look for it. I began to think ‘What have I got to give?’ I knew I was good with words so I just started drawing my poetry. I realised that making myself vulnerable through my work was actually a strength. If the words meant something to me, others could feel the emotion and put their own spin on it.”

She started sharing it on social media and watched her fan base and commissions quickly grow. (A personal highlight was when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern started following her on Instagram – “I took a screenshot and screamed down the phone to my sister!”)

Now working fulltime out of her loft-style studio and having released her first artist’s book titled Parentheses, Fleur says it’s “miraculous” the person she is now. 

“I’ve had dark shadows with me my whole life and I never thought I’d be free of them. But I can’t find them anymore. It’s beautiful here in the light.”