The table extends four metres along the back of Grace Aotearoa, an art gallery that I founded a year ago. Built into the table on either side are cupboards that contain the gallery’s inner workings: small editions and artworks stored onsite, lots of glassware for openings, accounts folders, various tools, kits, paint and a coffee machine that gets plugged in each morning. The table contains everything I need as a gallerist, and sums up my professional life in one object.
There’s a lot of goodwill vested in that table. It was built by Alex Laurie, a friend and artist who likes to float-mount the gallery interiors that he builds (a useful preference when the hairdresser next door floods the gallery). The brass handles were gifted by Powersurge Metalworks (my “sensible job” employer), while the chairs came from an old friend, Ophelia Harradine Bayly. The only object reliably on the surface is a vase made by my aunt, Kirsten Dryburgh.
Sometimes, when installing an exhibition with an artist, the table will solve a problem. Some small object or material that doesn’t work anywhere else will make sense on the table. In those moments, it functions more like a relaxed plinth, a place where artworks can gather among the other things at work that day.
Grace
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