B.
Open for business
Gallery
It's been a roller coaster ride for all of us in Christchurch over the last 10 days, and for staff at Christchurch Art Gallery as our workplace became an operational civil defence headquarters. Equally, it has been wonderful to see how sturdy our art gallery building is and how collections in storage and on display have withstood the main jolt on 4 September and the subsequent (but now happily diminishing) tremors as the landscape settles. And how committed and able our staff team has been!!!
It also is a relief to advise you that all the civil defence teams moved from the art gallery over the weekend and we open again today. Ballantynes, our largest inner city department store in Cashel Street re-opened last Friday (a reliable thermometer of community spirit); and there was a large open-air service outside the cathedral in the Square on Sunday. I walked through part of the city yesterday on what was a lovely sunny day and, despite an occasional barrier, Christchurch is back at work and re-gaining a sense of a return to the normal.
We are opening today and, from now on, it is pleasing for this gallery to be part of a confidence-building and recovery process (instead of being at the heart of the 'defence' strategy) and to help with a general healing of the spirits. As an important component of the city's cultural sector, we can do so much by giving locals and visitors to Christchurch the opportunity to see our collections again. And this will continue with the Ron Mueck exhibition when it opens to the public as planned on 2 October. It will be a special exhibition on multiple levels for us.
The construction in our entire downstairs space is proceeding to schedule and it's quite a dramatic change. I see that the team has already made the base plinth for In bed. It's massive and it will be awe inspiring when she's in place.
Jenny Harper
14 Sept 2010