Gallery a focal point for community

MY WORK: Wendy Harlick holds Golden Branches, one of the acrylic on canvas paintings in her King Street Artworks exhibition. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA

King Street Artworks have revamped their gallery and are giving individual artists the chance to showcase a collection of work at the venue which is now on Queen St.

King Street Artworks, the DHB-funded organisation, has worked out of Masterton for 18 years, giving the community free access to the "healing power of art" with a focus on promoting mental health and wellbeing.

Wendy Harlick from Masterton was the first to put her hand up for the opportunity to display her art in the gallery, where she will have an exhibition until the end of September.

Born in England, Ms Harlick moved to New Zealand in her youth and shifted to Wairarapa where she has been inspired by King St Artworks for eight years now.

"I moved to Greytown about 11 years ago, and am now in Masterton," she said.

"I guess I've always had a little dabble in art, but not very much until I came to King St.

"This is the first time I've had my own personal show.

"Pretty much when the gallery got finished, the plan was to have individual displays and they asked for volunteers.

"My exhibition will be going til the end of September so it's about six weeks.

Ms Harlick said the most difficult aspect of being an artist was meeting personal expectations and overriding the self-critic.

"When you get about 70 something per cent of what you were aiming at, then it's a happy event. You don't always get it though, and it can be quite depressing when you don't make it," she said.

King Street Artworks Coordinator Ian Chapman said their organisation connects all members of the community, focusing on giving people the help they need to recover from mental health issues.

He said that while this is the goal, King Street Artworks has an open door policy and all are welcome.

"Our focus is the recovery and keeping people in the community connected," he said.

"Being an artist means that there are no other labels on a person like 'mentally unwell' or 'schizophrenic' for example.

"They're just artists and that's all they are.

"This is the first exhibition we've done in here for a while.

"We converted this area into a Gallery Shop in December last year, which is all well and good but it didn't really give the individual artists an opportunity to showcase a collection of work so that's what we've done.

"Created a little feature area for those people that do want to show that work, but of course we do encourage people to exhibit outside of King Street, so we support them when their work is at Aratoi or other window galleries. That's part of the growth, moving on, and perhaps getting jobs and things like that.

"People will dip in and out of the services they need to.

"Art is important of course, but connecting to a community of like-minded people is very important," Mr Chapman said.

"Depression is a killer, isolation is a killer, so we know that this is extremely important for the community."