Home is where the art is

MARGIE THOMSON knows first-hand what it's like to have throngs of people around the house - all for the sake of art.

By the time they closed the doors of their studios last Sunday evening, farewelling the stragglers from what had been a torrent of visitors throughout the weekend, three inner-city artists were feeling talked-out but positive that this year's pp exhibition series was off to a good start.

One of those studios was at our house, my husband - sculptor James Charlton - being one of the three permanent members of the pp series. What pp means is that once a year, for three weeks, three artists exhibit their work - one weekend at a time - in Charlton's studio.

At the same time other artists are showing work in the studios of painter Ian Jervis and sculptor Chris Braddock, so the public can see nine artists over the three weeks. For many people it's more than a chance to catch up on these artists' latest work - it's an opportunity to peer behind someone else's front door. And don't we all love that?

Clearly we do, because people have been pouring in. It's a rather breathy experience to have unknown people milling around the forecourt, occasionally wandering past the studio and up to the house proper, blinking through the windows.

I'm suddenly "wife of the artist," a kind of untitled installation in my own home, occasionally appearing amid the throng bearing a teapot and biscuits, smiling self-consciously and wiping vomit from the front of a beautiful art student who has taken her turn with our five-month-old baby, Noah - the subject of almost as much analysis and admiration as the art itself.

The idea with pp is that artists can create a work that's more experimental or tangential than usual. Though the art world is forever institutionalising the alternative, pp arose from a desire to create an alternative space to commercial or public galleries and to other alternative spaces. It was probably always on the cards that the spaces themselves would become the subject, which is how Charlton read it this year.

He undertook to examine the resonances in his private workspace of the artists who exhibited there in last year's pp (Chris Braddock, Monique Jansen and Jan van der Ploeg).

By chipping away at the layers of paint on one wall he was able to uncover the work left by van der Ploeg, then adapt and incorporate it into his own work, for instance.

His work, called Pacific Choice, is thus a conversation between himself and other artists, as well as between himself and the audience who came to reflect on it. It was a conversation in the most literal sense, too, as one of the things that sets pp apart from most other exhibitions is that the artists are there the whole time, happy to talk about their work.

Usually the most contact you have with your audience is at the exhibition's opening, when conversation is very superficial, Charlton says.

The pp exhibitions provide a chance to have more intense discussions and, because there's seldom a time when there are not two or three people here, the whole day is like a continuous conversation in which you lose track of exactly who said what. But your understanding of your own work has, in the end, been enormously extended.

Charlton has almost always had a studio of some kind in his house - it's important to him not to be separated from what is going on in the family, plus there's the reality that while he's waiting for something to dry or whatever, he can easily do something else.

The Richmond Rd studio was specially designed to his criteria, which included being able to take a standard-sized sheet of customwood and turn it within the space. Who says artists aren't practical people?

To make it easier to switch off from the outside world, and to preserve valuable wall space, his studio has no windows apart from a high row of louvres.

"I need a work environment where I feel very confident and where I can pursue art-making in a totally unselfconscious way," he says. "Without that selfconsciousness born of the awareness of other people, I'm free to indulge myself.

"It's a very indulgent thing, making art."

On the Sunday afternoon of the first weekend I walk up to Chris Braddock's place, just 10 minutes away in Rose Rd. The wind is buffeting, the rain spitting and few people are about. Nevertheless, I see several people who have been to our place and now appear to be going to other studios.

Braddock is sitting by his front door in a director's chair, reading to pass the time. "Come on, then, show us your studio," I say, but he won't budge from his chair.

It's a very intimate work, he explains, waving the way into his studio, which lies slightly down the entrance hall. He wants people to experience his work without the presence of the artist.

It's quiet in the studio. The other people there are absorbing the space and work, called Repository I 2000, which is made up of two mirror-boxes in which sit flocked cushions reflecting, like the viewer, again and again.

Braddock is right, there is something confrontational about looking at yourself looking at yourself. And it's an interesting comment on voyeurism which relates well to the pp exhibition model - you know, here we are in the artist's most private space, looking around for clues ... Unlike the other two custom-designed studios, Braddock's was made by knocking out a wall separating two small bedrooms to create a narrowish rectangular workspace in the old and rundown villa that he shares with his partner, painter Esther Leigh.

Leigh's studio runs down the other side of the hall. Braddock has gone some way to preserving the couple's privacy by hanging white bedsheets across the hall so that visitors won't intrude on the living space under construction at the back of the house. After all, the pp invitation is limited: no dirty washing, no unmade beds, not even an artist at work. Simply the artist, a room and a finished work.

Having a studio at home is a relatively new thing for Braddock, and he loves being able to move in and out of it whenever he likes. Mostly, though, it is the flexibility of such a space that he enjoys. If he wants to cut holes in the wall, as he has done for Repository I 2000, where the mirror-boxes sit embedded into the wall, he can do so. "I don't want a precious space," he says.

By the time I get to Ian Jervis' place - a small 1940s Westmere bungalow with an award-winning studio grafted on top - it's after 5 pm. Exhibiting artist Paul Cullen has gone for the day and Jervis is downstairs making a cup of tea and contemplating getting his own work up for the following weekend.

I'm alone in the chapel-like quietness of his upstairs studio. Plentiful but indirect light, pristine white walls and gleaming, honeyed macrocarpa floors lend themselves wonderfully to creating an exhibition space - it feels more gallery than studio.

There are traces of the artist-owner in the stack of paintings leaning against one wall, but most of his usual work paraphernalia is downstairs. It's a room where emptiness and mysterious Alice-in-Wonderland type doors in the wall (one set small, one set bigger) poses more questions than answers, and it is hard to believe that this is the space Jervis once referred to, with casual humour, as his "office." It seemed so much more credible to say you were going to your office rather than to your studio, he would point out.

"Frankly," he says, "I'd rather not show in my own studio. I like to see my work in a different space." He spends a lot of time alone in his studio doing the things that artists who also teach do: painting (the lovely floor carefully covered with big cotton drop-sheets), listening to music and writing at the computer.

It's airy, light - the windows, which overlook the street, counteract the solitude by connecting him to the outside world - and, best of all, spacious.

His pp show, untitled, is made up of a series of abstract works on canvas which work together in units, with figurative works on paper. They address the relationship and established hierarchies between works on paper and canvas, between small works and big works.

The great thing about pp as a continuing series is its mixture of stability and variability, Jervis says. Each year, two-thirds of the artists are different than the year before. This year there is a mix of mid-career artists (as represented by the three who are the pp core as well as Mary-Louise Browne and Paul Cullen), young up-and-comings such as Lauren Winstone, Violet Faigan and Victoria Munro, and Jim Allen, now 78, one of New Zealand's earliest and foremost post-object sculptors.

As I write, Charlton is back in his studio using power tools to dismantle Pacific Choice. The TV monitor and anglepoise speaker have come off the wall, the recessed toilet ducks have gone, and all that remains is to white-out the prosthetic orange of the van der Ploeg painting in preparation for Mary-Louise Browne, who will make the studio her own domain for the second weekend's onslaught of visitors.

* From 5 to 7.30 tonight you can still see Mary-Louise Browne at 175 Richmond Rd, Ian Jervis at 101 Old Mill Rd and Lauren Winstone at 47 Rose Rd. Next weekend Jim Allen, Victoria Munro and Violet Faigan will exhibit at those venues.