Artist Zhu Ohmu works with clay as a material of memory and negotiation, hand-building forms that resist easy definition. Ahead of showing new work with McLeavey Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair, we caught up on her practice, place, and what draws her home.
What pulled you toward clay? It’s a material that remembers. Pressure is applied and the clay responds; it records touch permanently when fired. I was drawn to the tactile sensibility where one must rely on the physical friction between the hands and clay to discern where and how the material will move. I love the intimacy of touch that explores the transitional space where clay vacillates between formless and form.
Your pieces read as vessels but resist being purely functional. Where does that tension come from? Breakages are common in my work, especially in the first few years of making coil pots. The self-formulated coiling technique and precarious forms often led to cracks or the entire vessel caving in, and this could happen any time during the making, drying or firing stage. The vessel itself is a loaded form historically, culturally and domestically, implying use, containment and service. I’m interested in pushing it to a point where it becomes unstable.
Coiling is slow, physical, cumulative, and your forms can take on a structural life of their own. Walk us through making one work. Each work begins very simply: I start with a base slab and hand-build upwards, one coil of clay at a time. It’s the same basic additive logic as a ceramic 3D printer, layer upon layer, but done entirely intuitively. The pace is slow because clay in this form at this stage is vulnerable. As the walls rise, the form begins to assert itself, leaning, sagging, folding. Build too high too quickly and the form collapses from the weight of moist clay, undoing hours of work. I might enter with an intention, but the clay often redirects me. Bulges appear, drooping begins, tensions build. I reinforce here and compress there. The forms are often pushed close to their structural limits and the process is a negotiation between myself and the material.
Your forms have been compared to 3D printing. What interests you about the place where digital and handmade meet? 3D-printed ceramics are made by stacking extruded coils according to programmed measurements. Software directs a robotic arm, and the nozzle deposits clay with precision and consistency, allowing complex forms to be produced repeatedly and in large quantities. As a subversive strategy, I inverted the process. I emulate the mechanised logic of the printer by hand, an inversion of biomimicry, copying the machine through making by hand. By repeating the printer’s action of layering coils without pre-planning or digital control, forms emerge and claim organic qualities in ways machines cannot yet easily replicate. Between 2020 and 2021, I conducted an experiment at RMIT University in Melbourne where I 3D-scanned one of my pieces and attempted to print it. The printer could not reproduce the form without collapsing or significantly compromising it, rendering a simpler shape with less extreme overhangs. My hands can detect subtle changes in the clay body that a programmed system cannot, and respond to that in real time, adjusting as the form develops. I’m not resisting technology nostalgically. I’m exploring where the human body and mind still hold a distinct intelligence: patience, curiosity, observation, adaptation, knee-jerk reactions, gut instincts and the capacity for intimate material relationships. This research sharpened my curiosity about the ever-evolving space between human capabilities and machine limits, and what it means to remain relevant in an age of automation, particularly as anxiety grows around technology making humans obsolete.
You’ve studied in Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland, lived in Melbourne, spent the past year in Paris. Does place inform the work? I was born in Taiwan, grew up in Aotearoa and spent a couple of years in Shanghai as a pre-teen before studying at Elam School of Fine Arts in Tāmaki Makaurau. As I travel through life, I accumulate experiences like sediment settling in layers, gradually compressing into something solid. Over time, some of those layers settle into my practice. At Elam, I explored a range of media and was introduced to art theory, which I struggled with. Even so, it expanded how I think and shaped the way I articulate the conceptual foundations of my work. It made me place importance on accessible arts writing. In Melbourne, I continued to experiment across different materials, which led to working with ceramics and developing my coiling technique. Over the past decade, it has grown into my career. That period marked the start of a deeper, more tactile relationship with material and a sustained curiosity for experimentation and play. Moving to Paris is a gift to myself and my practice. Starting afresh in a foreign country, navigating the lay of the land, a new language and culture, meant beginning with what was already familiar: ceramics and my coiling process. From there, I leaned further into experimentation, refining my technique and honing the craft with greater rigour. I also devoted time to researching ceramic history and traditions, tracing how forms, methods and ideas have evolved across cultures and centuries. I became aware of parallels with my own diaspora experiences, how ceramics travel, transform and adapt as they move across places and communities. That awareness informs how I now approach material and concept, connecting my practice to broader histories while continuing to explore my own voice.
What are you bringing to show at the Aotearoa Art Fair? Works made over last summer, which I spent at my parents’ home in Auckland, my longest visit home in over a decade. It was a time marked by a growing awareness of my parents aging and the quiet, accumulative weight of time that often feels gradual, then dawns suddenly. This body of work was inspired by the distance and time difference that became palpable when I moved to Paris, and how absence and separation shape the emotional terrain of a diasporic life. The blue gradient of the works draws inspiration from the hazy blue of the horizon — the colour of where you are not.
zhuohmu.com
Interview Alice Lines
Photography Sam Hartnett