REASONS TO BE GRATEFUL
A Queenstown art curator is as much in sync with the universe as she is with her clients
Today she runs two galleries, both in Queenstown, one housed in the oldest building in town, the other in the newest. By happenstance they are right across the road from each other. The galleries represent 50 award-winning artists who she says are selected for originality and diversity.
According to Pauline, galleries can be bare silent rooms where people walk around, hands clasped behind backs, looking serious. She tries to make Artbay different. “A good art space is big enough for visitors to gain perspective on the work, but appeals more if all the senses are taken into account – great music, aromatherapy, a documentary film, artwork that is actually touchable, the artist painting in the gallery... even taste. We offer Jaffas to everybody who enters, hold wine tastings, and open champagne to celebrate a purchase.
“My purpose is to bring the art world into people’s homes and hearts. Art and elitism needn’t go hand in hand – there’s no need for stark, uninviting galleries. Great art creates great thought and great conversation. Art can take people into another world, a kaleidoscope of memories and the future.”
A recent exhibition, by Māori artist Cheree Te Orangaroa Downes, opened with a fully integrated fantasia. Cheree wore a traditional cloak, guests were entertained by kapa haka and the menu featured Māori food and cocktails.
Pauline says people shouldn’t worry about thinking they don’t know much about art. “It has to resonate with them, evoke, inspire, arouse emotions in a moment. Having an art collection grown over a lifetime is a wonderful vehicle for expressing your personality. Ten, 20, 30 years later, the art on your walls will be a scrapbook of your life and the places you’ve been.”
She has also invented an app that allows people to see a painting “on their wall”. Visitors to the gallery bring an image of their home space, select the artwork they like and by using the app can view it in place.
Pauline says the app has been instrumental in her making sales to people who live overseas. “We get orders from Russia or Canada, very often because they’ve been in the gallery during the tourism season. Global delivery makes original, authenticated New Zealand art a wonderful souvenir of their travels.”
She says New Zealand art seems to be powerfully attractive to tourists. “The artists channel the essence of the country, its uniqueness, nature, history, and Māoridom … art infused with its own integrity. Being around it, with new pieces coming in every day or every second day is utterly thrilling.”
Despite the covetousness that can arise as the bubble wrap is removed from a delivery, Pauline likes to keep life simple. Perhaps this is linked to her ongoing recovery from that slip on icy steps that led to the brain injury. It has been a long road back from those early days when the initial exhaustion of the first three months was just shocking.
“I’d get up, give my daughter breakfast, have a 15-minute window where I could read an email and then be so tired I’d have to go back to bed.” A transcendental meditation course helped, but two years into what is generally a five-year ordeal, the fatigue and insomnia remain flattening. Hence the latest burning thing in her stomach: a call to renovate the architecture of her life saw Pauline buy a bach in the seaside community of Karitane. “My life now has ocean and mountains and allows for the simple pleasures of nature by the coast, growing my own greens, and just being. That makes me happy.”
And should her happiness need a reset? “I make time for a special moment every New Year’s Eve. I take myself off somewhere alone for a few hours with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and make a list of my goals for the next year. Later that night, the fireworks go off and so too do all my dreams and aspirations for the year.
“Everything is out there, you just have to wait for the universe to bring it.”