Your connection with the Friends: Long-time committee member — for around 25 years, half the life of the Friends themselves. Also a volunteer photographer, website builder, and exhibitor. Through the Friends, I'm able to bring experience from a lifetime of photography involvement at national level, including my own creative business, and regional development roles including the formation of Arts Canterbury.

When you think about the Friends, what first made you want to be involved? My passion for artists and their art, and the ability to help through wide experience in exhibiting, judging, tutoring, speaking and authoring country-wide. That experience, and the recognition that came with it, saw me exhibiting at the Aigantighe since the early 1980s — so joining the Friends became a practical way to put my abilities into something I strongly believed in.

What do you enjoy about being part of the Friends? Being useful, mostly! I've photographed openings and gallery events over many years, and I make those images freely available to exhibitors and the public. With Roselyn I built the Friends' website, aigantighe.org.nz, which shares those photographs and the gallery's story with anyone, anywhere. There's real satisfaction in seeing an exhibitor able to keep a proper record of their show, or someone on the other side of the world discovering what happens in our gallery. And of course the people — artists, volunteers, and fellow committee members who all quietly give their time because they care.

What do you value about Aigantighe Art Gallery? That South Canterbury has a nationally significant art gallery is something very precious. I value the permanent collection, the mix of local and national artists on its walls, its events and the heritage house and garden with its statues that give it such distinctive character — a true heritage asset for our district. As a photographer I also value it as a place where the photographic arts stand alongside painting and sculpture; Because it exists, I've been fortunate to exhibit on various occasions over the years, including a solo show.

Is there a Friends-supported project, activity, or contribution that makes you feel especially proud? The website, built with Roselyn, and the ongoing photographic record of the gallery's exhibitions and events. Openings are fleeting — a couple of hours and they're gone — but photographs keep them. Over the years that has grown into a substantial visual archive of the gallery's life: the artists, the artworks, the crowds, the occasions. Making all of that freely available to exhibitors and the community matters to me, because it means the gallery's story isn't lost, it's shared.

What would you like more people to understand about the Friends? Many of the extras around the gallery happen because of the talents of volunteers who quietly make it possible — the events, the openings, the fundraising, the record-keeping, the advocacy. We do it because not only because it needs doing, but also because we care. Community support for art isn't just an extra though; it's the sole that keeps a regional gallery alive and connected to its people. Fifty years of the Friends is fifty years of that quiet work. Fifty years our artist have had a venue for their art and expressions. Fifty years our community, our school children, have had their lives lifted and inspired.

"I am part of the Friends because…" …photography and art power my life, and the Aigantighe is where our district's love of art is centred. Helping it flourish — with a camera, a website, or a hand on the committee — is simply my way of giving back: sharing and promoting the arts for the wider wellbeing of our community and beyond.