B.

APRIL 2011, AND THE GALLERY was occupied by CERA, Civil Defence, the City Council and a host of other city officials tasked with the immense job of tackling the destruction that had crippled our city. We’d been occupied since 22 February, and although our immediate future was uncertain, having been through this already in September 2010 (just before staging the hugely successful Ron Mueck exhibition) most staff remained positive that we’d be able to resume normal transmission sooner rather than later. So, despite awaiting internal post-quake repairs to my home, I decided to push on and take a few weeks to sand and paint my house—an old weatherboard bungalow in New Brighton that had taken decades of battering from the predominant north-easterly wind. It was hardly dilapidated, but a spruce-up was overdue. After four days on the end of an orbital sander, two days on a ladder painting the eaves and bargeboards, a week of double coating the weatherboards and another week of sills, foundations and trims I had run out of time. And I still had to get a couple of coats of enamel on the multi-pane windows—an immense amount of brushwork that was going to keep me busy for a few weekends to come. When I got back to work, however, nothing much had changed for the better in my absence. In fact, if anything, the picture was a little murkier regarding the Gallery’s reopening, and the tall apartment buildings next door were beginning to emerge as something of an elephant in the room we all now shared. Nobody really wanted to address them; they were spoken of only in hushed tones, as if silence would make the increasingly evident problem go away. We continued to make plans for new shows even as the mutterings grew in volume, and the ramifications of a potential demolition next door began to circulate. And then suddenly project managers and insurers were involved and our worst fears began to become reality. The whole collection would have to be moved.

Continued