Nick Atkinson: The machine that animates forgotten furniture

Katy Wallace's Curvesse chair from the Transmogrifier Collection. Photo / Nick Atkinson

Katy Wallace and her partner Paulus McKinnon are both magpies with an eye for picturesque objects in various states of disrepair. McKinnon used to collect alluring weatherboards that had come adrift before washing up on windswept coasts, their layers of paint weathered away, revealing colourful looms for the imaginative.

Meanwhile Wallace has created a somewhat mechanical alter ego called the Transmogrifier Machine, which rejuvenates articles, often locally made discarded antique furniture.

Wallace and McKinnon were both part of Indicator Studio, a collective of artists housed in what is now the head office of Greenpeace in Akiraho St, Eden Terrace. The pair were living the urban creative dream working and exhibiting with friends and colleagues in a vibrant independent space, but they wanted to put down roots and start a family.

They needed a home and with the Indicator tribe disbanding they needed studio space. After a couple of memorable road trips to Poverty Bay, the couple moved there with a newborn almost seven years ago. Predictably, their real estate dollars went further in Gisborne and they ended up with a collection of buildings on half an acre. As well as a house, the property hosted a group of elaborately vented sheds built to grow mushrooms in the 60s. These became their studios and the Transmogrifier Machine had a home.

Wallace and McKinnon are thriving in Gisborne, though many of their East Coast friends are also out of towners relatively new to the area. Many have come to escape the "consumerist frenzy" of the city, as Wallace puts it.

Last October, pieces from the Transmogrifier collection went on display at Tairawhiti Museum in Gisborne where locals could see their well-used furniture disguised and often reanimated by Wallace's imaginative craft. An elegant side table becomes more animalistic with the addition of a couple of new legs scavenged from another piece, the whole immaculately finished with the finest oils and paints.

The seats in her current exhibition are especially exquisite; reminding us that New Zealander Garth Chester was at the vanguard of cantilevered laminated plywood construction in the 40s with his memorable Curvesse chair. Discarded rocking chairs are reupholstered with worn slats from a set of wooden blinds intricately lapped together. The result is strong, comfortable and reminiscent of those washed up weatherboards that McKinnon was always searching for.

There's also room for half a dozen heritage chickens on their patch in Gisborne and though the old-fashioned chooks have a "poor egg laying ratio", Wallace says dryly, their feathers form a beautiful plumage for her home-grown gourds, that have become glamorous self-cooling flasks after their trip through the Transmogrifier Machine.

You can see Wallace's work at Objectspace on Ponsonby Rd until the end of February and the show travels to Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui on display from mid-March, through to April.