In September 2013, volunteers and a professional salvage crew painstakingly dismantled a Christchurch house at 19 Admirals Way that had been red-stickered for demolition. Each piece, removed by hand, was cleaned up and catalogued in order to represent the vast quantity of materials that comprise a home. Then came the design stage, in which artists and makers were invited to transform the materials into new objects.
This collection of objects will form an exhibition to run at Canterbury Museum. Visitors to the exhibit will see the work of master carver Brian Flintoff, as well as fine jewellery, furniture and toys, and many more works by some of the country’s finest designers and craftspeople. In August, around 200 art and objects will then be auctioned for charity.
“By taking one whole house and fully deconstructing it we could show firstly the huge scale of the materials and the volume of reusable material that was just inside one fairly standard house. And if we did that, we could then also engage a whole lot of thinking around those materials and what they were and their provenance and get creative minds thinking about those materials as valuable resources.” – Juliet Arnott, project founder and director of Rekindle, which facilitated the project.
