Leaving for Work, 2 October 2021 – 2 October 2022

Juliet Peter, who by her early teens had lost both her parents, was just twenty-four when she completed her studies at Canterbury College School of Art in 1939, soon after the outbreak of World War II. She worked as a nursing voluntary aid and in an office at Christchurch Hospital, before volunteering in 1942 for the Women’s Land Army, which was formed to replace younger male farm workers serving overseas. Because she had spent her childhood on a mid-Canterbury farm, Peter’s years with the ‘Land Girls’ returned her to early and happy memories of rural life. She and her co-workers took up tractor driving, ploughing, harvesting, mustering, shearing and wool sorting, all of which she also somehow found time to portray in drawings and paintings. She exhibited this lively saleyard scene at the Canterbury Society of Arts exhibition in 1945.