Registration Team

Christchurch Art Gallery has a collection of over 6,000 objects, and an ambitious exhibition programme that means valuable works of art are entering and leaving the building constantly.

The Gallery's registration team of Gina Irish, Tasha Mansbridge and Rebekkah Pickrill manage these processes, documenting the collection, ensuring its safety, dealing with copyright issues and managing all movements of works in and out of the Gallery - from individual loans to entire travelling exhibitions. This means ensuring that the works are correctly handled and packed, arranging transports throughout New Zealand and the rest of the world, and ensuring the Gallery is protected against undue legal risk.

All three have a background in the arts. Gina has an MA in art history and has previously worked on the CPIT art collection. Tasha and Rebekkah both gained their degrees in design, and Tasha worked in image services at Canterbury Museum.

The Gallery's exhibition programme generates a great range of shows, for which the collective logistics of the movement, handling, packing and security are huge. A large part of the job is arranging transport, and the team is often involved in transporting some strange objects, both around New Zealand, and into the country from abroad. One need only look back as far as the Gallery's recent Talisman show, which included jewellery made from animal products, to see some of the work registration must do with customs to ensure nothing restricted enters the country.

So, do the highs – visiting artists' studios and private collections that are never open to the public, meeting the collectors and the collected and getting close to works of art - outweigh the lows – long sleepless journeys in trucks, traversing the length and breadth of New Zealand on tight budgets and tighter timeframes. All three agree that they do.

But surely there must be some weird stories? Perhaps the smell that emanated from the woolly jumpers that Gregor Kregar's sheep had been wearing on the Gallery forecourt (they had to be returned to the artist within twenty-four hours, or before the stains became permanent). Or the challenge of trying to fit the two lubed-up pieces of Peter Robinson's giant Das Es sculpture together. Either way, the nature of the Gallery's exhibition programme ensures that there's always something interesting going on.