Being named 2025 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate is permission, she says, to be “even gnarlier”.
You’ve been recognised as an Arts Foundation laureate for the way you challenge and evolve ceramic practice in Aotearoa. Can you describe the thread that runs through your work? Clay and ideas…a preoccupation with the formal elements: form/space/colour/composition, with specific attention to ideas about Aotearoa as a fourth-generation Pākehā.
What first drew you to clay, and what is it about the material that keeps you curious? Art school was a real eye-opener for me. With exceptional tuition, I learnt the power of mark-making and how to translate an idea into two dimensions. I was curious to see how ideas could play out on three-dimensional form and, coincidently, at this time, I saw an exhibition: Contemporary British Ceramics at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, accompanied by the publication of John Houston’s Abstract Vessel. These early career influences are just as relevant for me today as they were 40 years ago.
Your work often feels deeply connected to place. How does your environment influence ideas or the way you make? I am just looking about and responding and reflecting on where we live, and what is happening to it, either by our own hand or by nature. I’m conscious of the permanence of fired clay. It will exist long after we will, and I ask myself what sort of legacy our generation will leave? This has an impact on how I think and what I make.
There’s a physicality to your process. What does a typical day in the studio look like, and how do you move between intuition and technique? I spend a large chunk of each day in the studio. There are periods of frantic activity when a show looms and other times when I’m in an experimental mode where I switch between making, drawing, writing and reading.
Ideas dictate process. Some demand a slab construction, others wheel-thrown forms. I can have an idea but getting it realised happens through a mix of intuitive and intentional making. Nothing is fully formed in my head before I start. It is a problem-solving process and sometimes I do begin intuitively — but only after weeks of thinking and making small preliminary works. I take photos of stages, draw the stages and think about the what ifs.
You’ve talked before about experimentation and risk in your practice. What does that look like for you at the moment? I’m in an experimental phase right now, with no fixed vision of where it’s all going. Even though it can be frustrating, it’s an important phase in the process to open me up to different possibilities.
Can you share a recent piece or series that felt like a shift, either technically or conceptually? Subterfuge, shown at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2022, was a large installation that felt like a shift conceptually and in scale. It pulled together my preoccupation with form and space in drawing and an overarching idea about our divaricating plant forms as a method of protection from browsing animals, which morphed into a generalised idea of protection since it coincided with Covid lockdowns.
Craft and commentary often meet in your work. How do ideas around politics, place or lived experience find their way into the pieces? Sometimes I have an idea which might come from listening or reading. It can be the starting point for making. Usually, it comes from sheer frustration that I can’t change how something is — so visual commentary is my only go-to.
When you look back over your career, which moments or works feel especially formative? Changing from making single one-off vessels to installation work was a big shift in my thinking. It happened after I had a residency in China in 2007. Their long ceramic tradition seemed to constrain their thinking and the making of new work. On the other hand, our barely 200 years of ceramics suddenly felt liberating.
When you’re not in the studio, where do you find the kind of rest or grounding that feeds your practice? Our garden or visiting the Central Otago hills of my youth.
If you think about the year ahead, what feels exciting or expansive for you — either in your practice or in life more broadly? It is very affirming to have had my peers select me for the Arts Foundation Laureate Award.
I want to delve deeper into ideas about how we are known for thinking outside the box, and punch above our weight in so many areas — and yet right now we are in danger of wrecking the environment, the very thing that we boast about most on the world stage.
I visualise making work that both celebrates the beauty of Te Waipounamu/the South Island and mourns its demise.
Watch out for shows with my dealers: The National in Ōtautahi/Christchurch and the McLeavey Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington.
thenational.co.nz; mcleaveygallery.com
Interview Alice Lines
Photography Liv van Leeuwen