Red-zoned home becomes museum art

  • Breaking
  • 18/05/2015

By Emma Cropper

A condemned house in Christchurch has been completely pulled apart and made into hundreds of pieces of art.

Instead of being smashed up and trucked off to a dump, recyclers wasted nothing in the red-zoned house, and now they're about to show off their handiwork at the Canterbury Museum.

"Every single piece of wood and wiring and wardrobe; anything you can think of in a house was taken out, catalogued and then that was given to artists and craftsmen to make innovative and useful artworks," says Canterbury Museum curator Marguerite Hill.

Even the wallpaper was put to good use, being remade in to a tiny model of the original home.

And the home's old glass windows become the rooftop to a wardrobe. 

The art is part of a one-off project called Whole House Reuse and founder Juliet Arnott believes it will open people's eyes to the value of recyclable material.

"It also shows that these resources are actually really valuable," says Arnott. "There's a lot of life left in them, a lot of durability left in them – so we'd like to think that this shows those materials are worth keeping and reusing."

Arnott believes not enough was done to salvage all that material that came about from all the houses demolished in Christchurch's red zone.

"But we would like to see and would've like to have seen in the past more salvage happening," she says.

Around half of the pieces will be auctioned off at the end of August, and they'll find out just how much ones person's trash can becomes another's treasure.

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source: newshub archive