We are coming up to our 9th year of Art Pharmacy being in business. As we approach the anticipated decade.... I would like to share a snippet of how the name Art Pharmacy came to be as an insight into my business and the industry. As everyone who runs a small business would know reflection is not something we have had a lot of time for, so indulge with me a while ...
Art Pharmacy is an unusual-sounding business name with a history and a bit of creative personality power behind it. When I returned to Australia after a successful art career in London and a stint in China I wanted to get into the art game and understand it's distinctly Australian identity. This was proving difficult to continue in the same vein of my London experience because the art industry here is much smaller and insular.
One day while helping out during a friend’s photography exhibition, selling artworks, and talking to customers, I realized I wanted to get back into the gallery world, but I wasn’t sure where to start. So, I put on a little show in a City of Sydney pop-up site on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. It was an amazing experience, we had no money to activate the site so I asked an artist to paint the walls, and we all dressed up in lab coats and 1960s nurses hats. I called this activation the Art Pharmacy.