Auckland-based artist Charlotte Drayton explores the passing trends of residential decor and a sense of suburban normality through renovation. In her installation It must be nice to work outside on a day like today, she has significantly transformed Te Tuhi’s outdoor courtyard with commonly used landscaping materials such as pre-grown hedges, shell groundcover and trellis fencing. Owing to the familiar appearance of its components, Drayton’s intervention achieves a degree of invisibility despite the amount of space it occupies and its awkward aesthetic relationship to the surrounding architecture. These intentionally prosaic stylistic quirks replicate the quiet way in which real-estate fashions inadvertently shape our physical and cultural experience of urban life.
It must be nice to work outside on a day like today was originally commissioned for the group exhibition THE HIVE HUMS WITH MANY MINDS.