Gary Collins: Pātaka exhibition designer turns ideas into experiences

I was still at art school in Christchurch in 1979 when one of my tutors, artist Quentin MacFarlane, asked me to help out installing a touring Bill Culbert show at the Robert McDougall Gallery. Since then, I must have worked on over 350 art exhibitions. It’s the best sector to be in. I can take an idea from a concept to an experience people want to spend time in.

In the early 90s, I worked full-time at the McDougall as a picture framer and technician while also developing my own art practice as a painter. That led me to roles at many of New Zealand’s foremost public galleries – Exhibition Designer at Te Papa, Exhibition Manager at Waikato Museum and at Puke Ariki, and now I’m Exhibitions and Collections Manager at Pātaka Art+Museum. I manage the team that both cares for the collection and constructs, mounts and installs the exhibitions.

I’ve recently created a show of nineteenth and early 20th century Japanese textiles that showcases a traditional method of repair called boro. The fabrics on display have been hand-repaired multiple times using sashiko, a simple running stitch. The term boro comes from “boroboro”, meaning something “ragged, tattered and worn out”.

Boro – Timeworn Textiles of Japan came about through a friend of mine, Pip Steel, who has been collecting examples of boro for years. I worked with Pip at Te Manawa in Palmerston North, and I always thought her collection would make an amazing exhibition one day. Pip’s interest sprang from her experience as a quilter. She started researching textile arts and really responded to boro. Pip bought one piece, then another and from there her passion for collecting grew.

Pip and I selected the pieces for the show and also worked together on the design of the show. The process was unusual for a public gallery in that there is no curator. It’s based around Pip’s collection, her research and her words. Pip’s interest and knowledge runs deep. My job was to create an exhibition that was true to the objects and their nameless makers – the handsewn household textiles and utilitarian workwear have their own stories to tell. I also wanted it to look beautiful and knew that white walls would be wrong; there are no pure whites in the textiles. This is not an art show, and the objects are not canvases.

When planning and designing a new show, I often model it but for Boro I just did a hand drawing – I knew I would be the one installing it. My team and I custom-made the bamboo hangers, purpose-built the cases and hand-made the mounting system and seats.

The challenge was to avoid people thinking they were just looking at old garments. The textiles needed to tell the stories of their traditional use, whether that was as garments or for wrapping things up. I wanted some of them to “slump”, to have form, and others to have a sort of “bellying out”. We also considered what could be touched and what couldn’t, so there are a range of heights and changes in frequency and texture.

I have a low boredom threshold but despite having worked on virtually every sort of exhibition, I enjoy the challenge of always finding something new and interesting to focus on.