Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

DOUGLAS LLOYD JENKINS, Director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery as well as one of New Zealand’s most prolific architecture and design writers, has objects – a lot of them. So what interests him about all of these objects? “What they do to make people think,” says Douglas.

His reliance on and fascination with them means that he surrounds himself with objects both at his heritage villa home and at work. The Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery currently holds over 100,000 objects, and Douglas is “cooking up ways to get them out into the public”. A background in teaching (previously he was a lecturer of architectural design and history at Unitec, Auckland) means that Douglas uses the displays within the museum to create “education spaces rather than entertaining spaces” and uses the objects to “explain, extend and provoke”.

In the home that Douglas shares with author Peter Wells, from the hallway through to his writing room, paintings, mementos, ceramics and trinkets are everywhere. These objects act as a visual reference library for his current thoughts. Douglas is careful to explain that he does not think of these items as collectables: “I have these little sorts of fads, but when the process of thinking is complete I will get rid of half of it”.

This is a reprint from the Urbis Magazine Best of Design Issue that featured several Hawkes Bay artists. Thank you Venture Hawkes Bay and Urbis for kindly allowing us feature the articles on Fruitbowl.

You can read more about Douglas on the  TVNZ website.