Style: May 04, 2018

42 STYLE | art
OFF THE
WALL
Had it not been for a knee injury at
high school, Christchurch may never
have benefited from the vision that’s
putting our city firmly on the world’s
public art radar. Gaynor Stanley
speaks with SCAPE Public Art
founding director Deborah McCormick
as she celebrates its 20-year milestone.
How it all began
“I always loved art at school and you’d find me in the art
room after school most nights, if I wasn’t playing sport,”
says Deborah, who was in the New Zealand Development
Squad for hockey when she suffered a major knee injury.
Encouraged by her Christchurch Girls’ High arts teacher
Nancy Bracey, whose husband Ted Bracey headed the
School of Fine Arts at University of Canterbury, Deborah
then started down the path to a Fine Arts and Art History
degree. After two exhibitions of her own photography,
having enjoyed the organisational and sponsorship process,
she pitched a proposal to council for a one-off exhibition
bringing business and arts together. At the same time,
Warren Pringle had returned from the UK on a mission to
foster the Christchurch arts scene and help arts graduates
find employment. “Together we set up a charitable trust
in 1998 and got all these brilliant advocates for the arts
involved, like our founding trustees Dame Adrienne Stewart
and councillor Anna Crighton.” Their first Art & Industry
Biennial Visual Arts Festival was held in 2000.
How SCAPE has grown along the way
Art & Industry was rebadged as SCAPE Public Art from
2002. In 2016, the six-week spring festival became annual,
and grown to encompass an established public art walkway
taking in the works permanently gifted to the city, a strong
education programme, Studio 125 Gallery (which pops
up twice a year to show SCAPE artists’ work with an
online store raising funds to invest in more), and a growing
consultancy business. To mark its 20th anniversary, SCAPE
has commissioned five limited edition works from leading
artists associated with the journey to date (see page 98 for
your chance to win one).
Challenges and opportunities
In a word, earthquakes. “We were in the middle of installing
when the September quake hit. We undid it, we redid it,
and then we were disrupted again, but that was a different
level of disruption. We didn’t have a home, we didn’t have
an office, we were operating out of a small flat that I had
taken in St Albans, one room where we slept, the other
two were offices.”
Deborah is full of praise for the fortitude of the arts
community and supportive response from Creative New
Zealand during those “incredibly challenging” yet “exciting”
times to not only keep going but to evolve and rethink the
role of public art. She helped form Arts Voice to provide
vision and strategy for the new city plan.
“I’ve really enjoyed being part of the big thinking vision
and advocacy. There was a real determination and an
opportunity to step up and take leadership and people
were putting my generation forward for that as it was