_{Image: Public Share, Good to Share, (Installation View),  2025.}

An open invitation to make use of the social space to take a break and enjoy a cuppa, utilising the Good to Go tumblers. Ceramic stirrers are also on offer for use with a cuppa, and if the public would like, they can be taken away.

Tea station hours:
Mondays to Fridays
10am – 3:30pm

Auckland University of Technology
Level 1, WM Building
40 St Paul Street

Established in 2014, Public Share is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist collective which engages in ideas of production and exchange.

The Good to Go installation conveys a sense of both looking forwards and backwards, with the generous array of documentation, craft objects, video, publications, and ephemera distributed through the space conveying a sense of a project that has continued to accrue new material across each venue it inhabits.

In this instance Public Share were invited to take over and occupy Te Wai Ngutu Kākā’s shared office, which gallery staff have cleared and vacated for the duration of the exhibition. Here they create their own hybrid workspace/smoko-room, which serves as a provocation for thinking through what an ideal workplace might look like. Upon entering the room we are struck by a continual push-pull. The front half of the room initially feels like a welcoming maker-space, with its bold fields of blue and orange, a bank of 3D printers, and a pristine ply table. Yet we quickly pick up on a more complex logic at play, as the collective draws from strictly practical work spaces of the trades. The blue and orange are in fact borrowed from in situ industrial shelving and safety equipment, and austere galvanised fences sharply divide the room into two zones: the front half a ‘mixed-use/ social space’ with an assortment of junk-store chairs and a steady supply of tea, and the back, which is clearly designated for making.

Combining object making and site exploration with social engagement and critique, the collective works with sites undergoing change and the workplace conditions that govern workers’ everyday activities, such as the hard-won entitlement to two 10-minute tea breaks in the working day. Their active blurring of the office/studio/break room, seeks to highlight the basic, yet hard fought, rights to break time and support, such as the 10-minute tea break, which under the pressures of neo-liberalism remains continuously contested. In some senses, while the perils of Fordist labour practices are well documented, the collective finds a certain dignity in a factory-like studio setting, a gesture of solidarity with those who have campaigned for workers’ rights.

_{Public Share is a four-person collective, consisting of Monique Redmond, Deborah Rundle, Harriet Stockman, and Mark Schroder. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, the collective works collaboratively to produce cups, mugs, tumblers and stirrers for use at tea break events hosted at construction sites and other workplaces, conferences, exhibitions and festivals across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Public Share’s activities are situated within the parameters of temporary public event-based installation, participatory and socially engaged art.}

_{Recent projects include: OVERDUE, pt. 1 at the Book Launch of Urgent Moments: Art and Social Change: The Letting Space Projects 2010-2020 at Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland 2024; No nSense: An antidote to Individualism pageworks and associated events for As needed, as possible: Emerging discussions on art, labour and collaboration in Aotearoa, edited by Sophie Davis and Simon Gennard, Enjoy Gallery, 2020-2021; Collective Agreement as part of The Future of Work, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 2019; OVERTIME for Suffrage 125: pt. 1, Celebration event at Parliament, pt. 2, Tea break event at Civic Square, Põneke Wellington, 2018; Public Share Workers Club as part of Social Matter, curated by Louisa Afoa, RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2017; Out of Office, curated by Zara Stanhope, RMIT Project Space Spare Room Gallery, Melbourne, 2016.}