For the last four years, one artist has been rebuilding the lost icons of the city in miniature form.
It’s a Friday morning and Mike Beer, aka Ghostcat, is flitting about Pūmanawa Gallery in Ōtautahi making last-minute adjustments. “These are actually from the Canterbury sale yards,” he says, gesturing to some graffiti’d concrete blocks sitting on a window sill. He tilts his head. “Does it look too much up there? Or would you have them on the floor?” Before I can answer, he’s off to tinker with a light fitting above Dig A Tattoo and Wizards Arcade.
It’s no surprise that Beer is obsessed with the finer details. Over the last four years, he has been meticulously recreating the lost icons of Christchurch as scratch-built miniatures for his project Ghosts on Every Corner. Now with all 13 builds on display in the Arts Centre and an accompanying coffee table book for sale, people can revisit the local hotspots demolished after the quakes, including the baby pink Atami bathhouse and the ornate Repertory Theatre.
“I thought this was going to be a year-long project, but it’s taken a lot, lot longer,” Beer laughs as we stroll through the gallery. “It needed that much time to do Christchurch justice – I can look at everything in here now and know that I’ve done everything I possibly can.” That level of care can be found in everything from the tiny party pill distribution catflap of Cosmic Corner, to the grimy window of the warmer in the Dog House fish and chip shop.
We stop outside Smith’s Bookshop, where Beer hand-folded 5,000 tiny books with some help from family and friends. The collaboration didn’t stop there – he asked followers on social media to pick out a meaningful book to be included in the shopfront, and included classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, to Memoirs of a Geisha, and even Fifty Shades of Grey. I squint to read the titles, and suggest he must have very good eyes. “Not anymore,” he laughs.
This is just one of countless ways that the Christchurch community has contributed to Ghosts on Every Corner. In his tiny rendering of the Canterbury Sales Yard, Beer got some of his street artist friends to come and recreate their tags in miniature form. Without high resolution photographs or blueprints to work from, he relied on locals to fill in the knowledge gaps, including a former employee of Wizards arcade who drew out a floor plan of the machines.
The accompanying coffee table book, bound locally by McHargs and co-written with Dr Reuben Woods, also sources the everyday stories of each location from the wider community. “It’s not about where the best coffee was, or the best food, it’s about the heart and sometimes the underbelly of these places,” says Beer. There’s a yarn from the Atami that probably should be in a sealed section, but also plenty of heartwarming tidbits from the past.
“We got a great one from Wizards when we interviewed the guy who owned the place, Gary Walker,” says Beer. “He told us about how all the local kids figured out that if you rub your feet on the brand new carpet and create all this static, they’d get free credit. It was called ‘zapping’ and he said they lost thousands of dollars. It’s such a great story – they eventually got a grounding rod and grounded the floor so kids couldn’t zap the machines anymore.”
Last month, Beer previewed the project inside the Christchurch Cathedral, marking the first time an artist had used the space since the 2011 earthquake. “It was quite an emotional day, especially with people not seeing it for the last 14 years, so there were a lot of tears,” he says. “It’s such an important building and space for Christchurch, so I liked the idea that this project could give it a new lease on life and remind people it can be used for other things.”
The full exhibition is now on at the Arts Centre, and Beer has already seen thousands of locals through the doors for a walk down memory lane in the first week. “Without being cheesy, it’s given me a deeper knowledge of the city and the people, so I just feel even more connected to Christchurch now,” he says. “It feels like something quite special and overwhelming, because without people’s stories and support, none of this would have come to fruition, you know?”
“This feels so much bigger than just me as an artist – this is encompassing of everyone.”
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