While my very devout, very proper Irish Catholic Nana on Dad’s side had conniptions, the rest of my not very devout nor very proper family tried not to lose it. They failed gloriously as Grandad on Mum’s side fatally uttered, “Well he’s been spending a fair bit of time with those uncouth bastards in the woolshed.”

My Irish grandparents never visited Mum on the family farm again.

Spending time in woolsheds was a big part of my early life – as an eloquent toddler acquiring a passion for rarified language, as a rousey during my late primary school years, and finally on the press (sometimes the handpiece) during high school and uni holidays.

Going shed to shed down the Wairarapa’s dusty gravel backroads, feeling boards underfoot polished velvet smooth by years of lanolin and moccasins, the heft of a press crank, the distinctive CLICK as the stand starts up and the hand- piece buzzes furiously into life, the redolence of woolsheds and farms, the taste of strong tea, smoko break kai and cold beer – they all compacted themselves into my DNA like a properly packed wool bale.

I’d left all this behind me, moved onto life in a portside town, not really thinking about it all that often.

I thought I’d been profoundly moved by art before. But that was until I came across Toss Woollaston’s Untitled [Quentin (Kin) Woollaston Shearing] during a random lunch- time visit to the Gallery. This hastily drawn sketch captures the brutal physicality, controlled elegance and hard-earned grace of a shearer in action. For me, it conjured a form of alchemy that coaxed time to rewind unexpectedly, reliving all those sensations, everything hurtling back in an instant, hallucinatory, visceral jolt to the senses, twenty or so years after I was last in a woolshed.

That, for me, was what it felt like to be profoundly moved by art.