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Dowse Art Museum director Karl Chitham (Ngāpuhi) lives on Wellington’s South Coast in a converted 1950s bach that’s filled with a very personal collection of art. Chitham and his partner bought the home just before New Zealand went into its first Covid lockdown.

KARL: e moved into our home as soon as we went to alert level , so we used to do these little walks past it during level and just look at the sold sign and wave at it.

It used to be a single level, stucco, flat roofed bach with a giant, smiling sun painted on the outside. There were all sorts of kooky things about it. The second level was added in the s.

Half the upstairs is blue, and the other half was white. I guess it’s a neutral backdrop for our work, but actually the view is the real backdrop. It’s a very light house, and the view becomes part of the artwork.

The things we have around us relate to memories, or relationships I’ve had with artists or friends. So everything has a little memory attached to it.

I do have a lot of things, a lot of objects. Part of that is because I actually trained as a jeweller, so I’ve had my finger in the craft pie for a long time.

The Suji Park figurine is really typical of the objects I have. Some of them are not what people might consider important pieces, but they are important to me because they have these stories attached to them.

I’d seen that figurine in two shows previously, before I was able to purchase it. Suji used to carry the figurines around in her bag, so they would get a little life on them.

They might have a chip here, or they might get grubby there, so they’d lived before they went to the new owner.

That little figurine used to be one of a pair, and the partner had been broken. hen I curated a show, I asked Suji’s dealer if he had any of her

figurines because I really wanted to include them. He only had that one, and he was sorry, but Suji doesn’t usually let one of the pair go.

But she did for that show, and I was able to buy it. I purchased the Bronwynne Cornish piece more recently because I’d always wanted a piece of her work. I’ve known her for many years. Her pieces are such characters. I feel like each one has a little bit of her in it, so even though the figurine we have, she makes quite a lot of those, they are all unique in that they’re all handmade.

The strange rock form is called a clod, and that’s by Madeleine Child, who is a South Island potter. I love that she’s really experimental with it and that it’s almost like anti-craft.

The little monk is by John Roy, a Tauranga potter. I have this weird fascination with jugs. I don’t know where it came from.

In New Zealand, we’ve all grown up with Crown Lynn. I went through quite a heavy stage of purchasing any Crown Lynn jug I came across, in whatever op-shop I was in, so I have quite a large collection.

That expanded out into other makers’ jugs so there are a few other examples in there, as well as older works by some New Zealand potteries, but also just things I’ve come across where I really like the shape.

This 70s rug was given to me by somebody that said it came out of the Ōpōtiki Plunket rooms. It cemented my interest in these little pieces of architectural history.

I love the stories that go with bits of carpet. But you can tell from all these things that I love the stories that go with everything.