Our Story
Saving art from the skip and framing it for a bright future.
Incredible artwork is created at a secondary school level and, more often than not, these student art folios, filled with fabulous works, end up either in a deep, dark corner of their parents' garage or in the school skip.
Our new initiative, which launched in 2018, is a free programme available to Senior Visual Artists (Year 11-13) to showcase their work and connect with our community of collectors. We provide upfront financial support, through the purchase and professional framing of the original artworks and fund the reproduction of their limited edition prints. The artworks are then made available to the collectors through our online gallery and annual exhibition, with a commission of all sales going directly to the artists.
Our Secondary School art students face a number of roadblocks when taking the first daunting leap to publicly showcase their artwork. They often lack confidence, resources and funding to create and present their work on a professional level and have limited ways of marketing themselves and connecting with the wider arts community. Since our inception in 2018, The Creators’ Room has provided upwards of $85,000 in financial support to our young Creator’s in Canterbury alone.
As part of our mission to encourage continued participation in the arts once these students leave their school environment, we award an annual scholarship to one deserving Creator, consisting of a $3,000 cash contribution to help support the growth and development of their artistic career. The scholarship is judged by an independent judging panel consisting of practising artists and art experts.
While our programme is currently only available in Canterbury, watch this space...we will be bringing this opportunity to all Secondary Schools throughout New Zealand in the coming years.
How did The Creators’ Room come about?
Since way back, we have both had a serious love and respect for art and the creative minds behind it. We love the weird and wonderful! This stemmed from our days at high school, hours of creating, covered in ink, paint or sepia toner, in dark rooms, frantically racing to meet deadlines for end of year panel submissions. Then off to University we went with near empty pockets and all the artistic skills that our passionate art teachers had drilled into us, went straight to some forgotten far corner of our brains.
Now many years later, married and filling our nests with objects of desire, it became apparent that covering the walls with beautiful yet affordable works was quite the challenge. And so The Creators’ Room was born.
So for the Creators out there, we are here to help you get found and to reap the rewards for your efforts. Your artistic skills need not go to forgotten places like ours once did.
And for the Collectors out there, we want to give you access to these ridiculously talented creators to fill your homes and hearts with glee.
We hope you love our collection as much as we do.
