There is nothing like a family gathering to remind you of who you are and where you come from. If Christmas dinner with the second cousins didn’t do the trick this year, there is always an interactive portraiture exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery that can help you to see yourself in a new light. Classic portraits by Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins sit alongside photographs of All Black’s Supporters, while easels around the gallery encourage visitors to try their own hand at the artform. I took my visiting family to check it out, and while drawing your nearest and dearest may not be the best course of action if you are aiming to preserve civil relationships, we gave it a go and ended up seeing a new side of each other.

Mum’s favourite artwork was a sculpture of a man and his dog. This may or may not have been a symptom of canine withdrawal, as she left her own pup in Auckland this Christmas and has had to do make do with skype calls home rather than having a dog on the end of her bed.

Dad preferred Nigel Brown’s lemon tree, while the rest of my cohort made a beeline for the easels. The exhibition offered my man a moment away from the in-laws to try his hand at self-portraiture. Having not sketched since third form art class, the results were impressive. He was not quite game enough to try sketching me or mum however, and decided it was safest to try the light box for drawing silhouettes. Sister two’s hat looked very stylish in profile, and there was less chance of offending her by drawing a wonky nose or forgetting to add eyebrows. (Dad’s abstract version of mum did not go down so well, largely as a result of this omission).

The artworks on display would not look out of place in a city gallery, but the best thing about the exhibition was the range of questions that accompanied the portraits, encouraging the audience to think about what their own version might look like. I never thought I would be answering questions such as ‘What am I wearing’ with ‘gumboots,’ so living in Mid Canterbury has definitely changed the version of me that would be seen in a portrait.

These days I would be with my dog, in my library, with the mountains visible in the background through the window, and there would be a bunch of home grown flowers on the side table, just for good measure. In Auckland I would have chosen a beach setting, with my family in the painting. Gumboots would definitely have been out, and the only thing in a vase would have been a sprig of the impossibly hardy rosemary from under the front steps. Moving south means I have swapped beaches for a beetroot patch and mum and dad for a mutt, but I am proud to show my family this new South Island version of their daughter, in full portrait.

Originally Published in The Ashburton Guardian