Art Auction Review

Last Friday was the big day, the day of our Silent Auction Fundraiser – and phew, what a day it was.

From our previous blog posts you will know that we have had many artists generously donate work and our children at Kindergarten have also been working on pieces to be sold at the auction. These had been on display at the Old Stone Butter Factory for a couple of weeks; however not many of our children had had the opportunity to view the art.

A selection of our children's work on display

On the afternoon of the auction we invited our Kindergarten children, along with their brothers, sisters and other family members for an afternoon tea and to view their work on display sitting alongside our professional artists.

It was a wonderful opportunity for the children to see how much we value their work as artists, but also for them to recognise the importance of building an ethos where relationships and community lay at the heart.

Te toi whakairo, ka ihiihi, ka wehiwehi, ka aweawe tea o katoa

Artistic excellence makes the world sit up in wonder

At 5pm it was time for the auction to begin – how exciting. Registration was underway and at 6pm the first lots were ‘silently’ auctioned.

There was a real buzz in the Old Stone Butter Factory, lots of good-humoured banter as people refused to leave the side of particular bidding sheets, just in case they lost out! It was a wonderfully fun and enjoyable evening.

Artist Richard Darbyshire (centre) views the work on offer.

It was fantastic to welcome so many of our families to the event, and also many of our contributing artists – thank you we loved seeing you there enjoying the evening.

'Jeff' with artist Rosie Parsonson

‘Jeff’ our largest piece of the evening, donated by artist Rosie Parsonson was the final piece to be sold – and moving away from the silent auction for this one piece we auctioned it live. What an exciting yet tense moment  - lots of nail biting going on from me here – as I was one of the bidders!

Happily winning an auction!

Anyway, I'm sure what everybody wants to know is how much did we raise? The answer is a phenomenal $5400 – wow! This is just incredible. We are really going to be able to go ahead and work towards building and updating our art studio at Kindergarten into a space that is so much more purposeful and inspiring for our children.

I know we thanked everyone in last weeks blog post for their amazing hard work and contributions, but I’d just like to acknowledge everyone again. This event has been incredible to work on; we have had so much community support. Current parents at Kindergarten as well as parents from children who have moved onto school have been so instrumental in making this happen; our artists have been so generous I can’t say thank you enough; our parent group were like Trojans working on this – thank you; Jamie and Glenn – thanks for the music it was fantastic and of course to everyone that bought a piece of art and helped us raise our amazing $5400 – thank you, thank you. Finally of course a big thanks to Kim – this was all her incredible idea to begin with – very in keeping with our provocation ‘it’s the little moments that make life big’.

Christine