Art auction for Sir Ray Avery's latest venture

Art Auction for LifePod
Auckland Art Gallery and online
November 5

Some of New Zealand's senior artists are coming to the aid of science and children’s health next week. Responding to requests by Sir Ray and Lady Anna Avery, 50 artists have donated works to a major charity art auction to raise funds for the rollout of LifePod incubators across the Pacific from January 2016.

The art works on offer, valued at more than $250,000, have been contributed by artists including Dick Frizzell, Stephen Martyn Welch, John Radford, Marti Friedlander, Emily Siddell, Barry Lett, Emma Bass, Dame Rosie Horton and Lady Pippa Blake.

Dick Frizzell has donated a painting worth $35,000, Mark Cross has one of his hyper realist lndscapes and Pacific artist Michel Tuffery has contributed an intricate tapa cloth painting, valued at $12,500 combining abstract patterns and images of birds.

The charity auction will be hosted by Webb's, which has released an online catalogue to enable early bids. It will run a live auction on the evening of November 5 at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Sir Ray has created a number of medical devices that have helped save the sight and lives of millions of the world’s poor, These low-cost, sustainable medical devices, invented in the garage of his Mt Eden, Auckland home, include intraocular lenses to combat cataract blindness, and the laboratories and technology needed to make them; an intravenous flow controller to prevent fatal drug administration errors, and more recently a high-tech, low-cost, low maintenance incubator that will save lives of premature babies in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa.

His products have a global use, both in the developing and developed world, and the demand for them provides funds for his charity, Medicine Mondiale, which then reinvests them where they are needed most.

The LifePod is his latest project aimed at minimising the risks to at risk babies in their first weeks. Sir Ray says, “Today's incubators just aren't designed to work in the hostile developing world environment.”

 “In Fiji they were given 30 incubators by the UN which had been designed and produced in China and they cost $16,000 each. But after six months they were not working. It’s almost immoral for multinationals to market these machines with no budget for maintanence.  They are not designed for most developing countries. You look at the instructions on the sides of these machines – use in air-conditioned environments at temperatures between twenty five and thirty degrees – no wonder they fail.”

“They are expensive and need constant repairs and maintenance, purified water and uninterrupted power supplies.”

“LifePods purify their own air and water and run for 10 years so, if we put one of these into a Fiji hospita,l it will save the lives of up to 500 lives for a fraction of the price of existing incubators.”

“My main aim is to address the inequalities between being born in a place like New Zealand and a place like Sierra Leone but the project is going to take $2 million to produce enough LifePods to make a real difference. “

Details of the artworks available and online bidding at here

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