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This year’s Harbour Hospice Art Exhibition & Sale features art from around 80 local and national artists, including paintings, sculptures, photography and garden art.
The event is a fundraiser for the local Hibiscus Hospice in Red Beach.
One returning artist is Tracey Currington, a Millwater resident who specialises in an Ancient Greek technique known as encaustic art, made using melted beeswax and damar resin. The process involves mixing pigment with the beeswax and damar resin, then adding it in layers to a surface, such as wood panels. Each layer must be fused to the other, using heat. The encaustic technique can also be used to create 3D sculptures.
Tracey put her work in the hospice fundraising exhibition for the first time last year and sold all three of her pieces.
With a long career behind her in accounts and office work, Tracey, aged 61, became an artist later in life – only taking it up in 2015. The self-professed ‘creative introvert’ began pursuing her passion after the death of her mother, and after changing jobs to work part-time in accounts for the hospice exhibition’s venue, Estuary Arts Centre. She is mainly self-taught, apart from a weekend workshop and some online courses.
“I’d always wanted to do something creative,” Tracey says. “But it wasn’t until these changes in my life that I had the time and space to think about what I really wanted to do.”
Being part of this exhibition to raise funds for Harbour Hospice has special meaning for Tracey because her first husband, Rob, died from pancreatic cancer 31 years ago, at the age of 31. The North Shore Hospice supported her to care for him at home.
From Rob’s diagnosis until he died was only three weeks.
“He literally called in sick to work one day and never went back,” Tracey says. “Our son was only six months old and it was all such a blur. I wanted to care for Rob at home and the hospice nurses were incredible in supporting me to do that. They came at the drop of a hat and brought us everything we needed to keep Rob comfortable.”
Tracey says that being able to contribute to this exhibition is her way of giving back to a charity that gave her so much.
Art for a good cause
The exhibition and sale has something to suit every taste and budget. It is on at the Estuary Arts Centre, 214B Hibiscus Coast Highway, Orewa, from June 3-6. Entry by donation. A ticketed preview and auction night is on Thursday, June 2. Tickets: harbourhospice.org.nz/our-events/
