Giant Clark portrait found at tip
An enormous portrait of Helen Clark has wound up on Trade Me after it mysteriously appeared at the tip in Wellington.
‘‘It was dropped off where people dump their rubbish,’’ Wellington City Council spokeswoman Victoria Barton-chapple said.
‘‘One of the chaps up there noticed it and said it deserved a better resting place, so they cleaned it up and put it on Trade Me.’’
The listing pitches the painting as ‘‘a portrait of our first ever elected female prime minister, Helen Clark’’.
The painting started with a $1 reserve.
The council has promoted the auction on Twitter and the former Labour leader herself has reportedly been looped into the conversation but so far has said nothing about the find.
‘‘It’s probably night-time where she is, so we will give her time,’’ Barton-chapple said.
The unsigned and undated portrait is done on two sheets of plywood and measures 2.4 metres high and 1.2m wide.
There is no signature and no telling who dropped off the painting.
‘‘It’s a mystery,’’ said.
‘‘The other thing we’re hoping is that someone will recognise it and come forward.’’
However an image in The Dominion Post archives contains the same image, with the caption: ‘‘A portrait of Helen Clark by artist Chris Finlayson is erected as part of a GE protest on an Evans Bay Bartonchapple boatshed by Peter Russell (left) Alex Barnes, Morgan Cox and Maibritt Pedersen.’’
Not to be confused with the politician, artist Chris Finlayson is a Kiwi mural artist from Golden Bay. In 2015, he lost his life’s work after his Takaka house was razed in a fire.
Finlayson has been approached for comment.
It remains unclear what happened to the portrait after the protest and how it came to wind up at the Wellington Transfer Station.
It’s not the first time the former country leader has been immortalised in art – in 2003 a portrait of Helen Clark by Maurice Bennett, made of 3024 pieces of toast, was unveiled at a Mission Estate winery festival in Hawke’s Bay.
In 2006, Hugh Major painted the then Labour prime minister as an earth mother with a small Winston Peters in her hair.
She was depicted as a young and beautiful giantess dominating a heavily symbolic Kiwi landscape.
Peters was her coalition partner at the time but her hair also included faces of former Labour prime minister David Lange, her deputy Michael Cullen, and then Progressives leader Jim Anderton.
Barton-chapple said proceeds from the auction would go to administration costs for running the tip shop, Second Treasures.
When asked what other bizarre finds had turned up at the shop over the years, Barton-chapple said: ‘‘I think they had a coffin at one stage.’’
Props used by Weta Studios occasionally showed up too, she said.