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Some of New Zealand's richest art collectors will pay for pyjamas for children in women's refuges when they write cheques at a fundraising sculpture show opening on Auckland's North Shore tomorrow night.
The Sculpture on Shore exhibition, organised by the Friends of Women's Refuges, boasts artworks by 106 sculptors priced at a total of $1.4 million.
A third of the proceeds will fund essentials such as pyjamas, nappies, toothpaste and toothbrushes for children who often go to the refuges with only the clothes they are wearing. The rest of the money will go to the sculptors.
Tomorrow's opening will come on the same day as a march around the Manukau City shopping centre to launch Family Violence Awareness Week.
The sculpture show started in a private garden in 1996 and is now held every two years at the Fort Takapuna Historic Reserve, formerly known as Fort Cautley, between Narrow Neck and Cheltenham Beaches.
Trucks delivered artworks yesterday from sculptors spread from Kaitaia to Invercargill.
Curator Helen Schamroth said it had become "one of the bigger sculpture exhibitions" in the country. "It's become quite prestigious. There are artists who really want to be part of it."
Big names include Grechten Albrecht, with two works valued at $30,000 apiece, Paul Dibble, with a $38,000 "artistic in-joke" called "Two tuis love Brancusi" (a Romanian sculptor who died in 1956), and Grant Williams, with the highest price tag on a single work - $45,000.
Three works by Virginia King, created for the medal-winning New Zealand garden at London's Chelsea flower show this year, are up for sale - two for $29,500 each and one for $34,500.
But lesser-known artists are offering works priced from $1200 upwards.
Glen Innes builder Chris Hargreaves graduated from Unitec's art school in 2003 and builds houses "to pay the rent" but devotes his spare time and weekends to sculptoring.
His Voyage to the Antipodes ($3440) features a wooden and stainless steel feather and paddle, harking back to older means of transport.
"It's getting back to a bit more of the basics, saying society is so wrapped up in going fast and should just take time to appreciate what's around you," he said.
Waiheke artist Richard Wedekind's three steel figures, Shock and Awe ($6000), use the dramatic backdrop of Rangitoto Island to make a statement "about wonderment and awe, about man and his place in the world".
Tickets for the show's gala opening tomorrow night are almost sold out at $75 each. The show will then be open from 10am-6pm from November 3 to 12 at $5 a head.
Tomorrow's march in Manukau, in contrast, will be free. Marchers will gather at the skate bowl in Hayman Park behind the Manukau City Centre at 9am and march around the perimeter of the shopping centre to a rally in Manukau Square.
A cousin of Riki Mafi, the 17-year-old killed with a baseball bat while walking through the Otara town centre in September, will speak alongside Emma Afa of Maori TV's Ask Your Auntie, Manukau Mayor Sir Barry Curtis and others.
South Auckland Family Violence Prevention Network manager Rodger Smith said the march had been planned since April.
Agencies offering to help families deal with violence will be on hand in the TV2 bus at Manukau City Centre tomorrow and in other parts of Manukau until November 12.
