I [Marcy] grew up as kid living on dairy farms, often moving about the Waikato when June rolled around. Like a classic farm kid, I loved calf club day, watching Country Calendar on Sundays and just being out on the farm with my two brothers any chance I could get. We’d be off all day building tree huts and dams, fishing in the streams, eeling, goat or possum shooting and rabbit hunting with our dog Buffy.

When I was at college, I worked as a kitchen hand in a cafe. I quickly realised that hospitality was not my calling and asked my neighbour for a job working on the farm he was managing. From there I worked on many farms, sometimes just relief milking while I studied. I loved the freedom of it - most of all being outside and keeping fit. After a while I decided I wanted a new challenge and my best friend introduced me to agri-contracting, from there I was driving tractors, everything from groundwork, raking, baling, drilling, mowing and chopping for 6 years across the country. 

When I met my now husband, Josh, we moved to Nelson where I called around forestry crews and did a stint as a QC and dabbled in some fleet/source/stack. I hung up my chaps after a back injury. As always, the next adventure was on the horizon.

I think what had been missing from my work was a creative outlet. I view CC as my hobby, although I love to draw myself, I would not be able to produce regular, high quality prints alongside my other fulltime employment. So, I outsourced and found a wonderful artist who brings my design ideas to life. Each print is hand drawn and designed with careful thought and often many revisions to get the details perfect.

Thank you for supporting CC and everything it stands for, I hope to see you rocking one of the prints!

In memory of a remarkable human

My late brother Owen was a give you the shirt of his back kind of guy, he really was the most genuine soul I was blessed to grow up alongside. He got me into duck shooting and deer hunting when I was a teenager. We never had much success at it but we enjoyed the adventure, conversations and learning.

We got lost in Pureora’s one day. It was night time by this point and I remember we got all tangled up in supplejack and bush lawyer questioning what the fuck we were doing out there. The block had been 1080’d and I remember clearly how eerily quiet it was out there. We learnt to do our homework from then on.

Owen wanted to plan a hunting trip to the South Island, to fly into the alps somewhere, we never got there together, devastatingly he took his life by firearm in 2020. We were completely blindsided by this loss. Shortly thereafter, I decided to spontaneously leave my contracting job and head to the South Island with Josh, I think in part hoping he could live through my experiences. I would often think of him as I sat somewhere up in the alps, wishing he was there to see the beauty of it, the deer, tahr and elusive chamois in the vast expanse of DOC land; there was so much more for him to experience. 

To honour my brothers memory, the 29 years of comradery, kindness and raw moments he brought to my life, I have dedicated two prints in my collection to him, the King of the Bush and Duckshooting with the Best Mate. I will be donating $1 for each of these prints sold, annually, to a great cause I know he would back - the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation.