Auckland Studio Potters: AiR1
12 October 2022 – 12 February 2023
Exhibition Opening: Sunday 16 October, 10am-11.30am
Little Gallery
The Artist in Residence programme was established at Auckland Studio Potters (ASP) in 2019. Callouts were distributed for applications from national and international potters and ceramicists to spend up to three months working in one of ASP’s two pod studios on the Centre’s grounds in Onehunga, Tāmaki Makaurau.
The ASP committee has identified the residency programme as having the potential to stoke the local fires of a resurgence in the ceramic arts worldwide and to provide a creative hub for experimental and traditional ceramics in New Zealand. Resident artists help around the centre and teach wherever possible and in doing so become valuable contributors to the centre’s whanaungatanga and shared sense of community.
ASP are proud to introduce the eleven artists who, since its inception in 2019, through the difficult Covid years, to the first semester of 2022, feature in the inaugural AiR1 exhibition. Included artists span the full range from young graduates to traditional artisan master craftsmen to contemporary exhibiting artists and modern table and homeware specialists. The AiR programme is keen to foster this eclectic cross-section of clay workers and recognises the value in both traditional and contemporary ceramic practices.
Auckland Studio Potters is a not-for-profit community-based organisation that offers pottery classes from beginners to master classes. It is located in Onehunga, Auckland and was established in 1961.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Siriporn Falcon Grey is of Spanish-Thai descent and moved to New Zealand in 2007. She is a potter whose process and aesthetic is heavily influenced by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi as well as the art of ancient civilisations and their spiritual approach to art making.
Fiona Jack is currently Acting Head of the Elam School of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Auckland and has a long history of art making in New Zealand and in the US. For the past 10 years Fiona has developed a pottery practice in which she focuses on wood fired domestic ware. She enjoys understanding how these vessels function (the thousands of ways the rim of a cup can be shaped for the lip to rest on) and their engagement with the body and the ways we use domestic objects.
Richard Penn is a new arrival in New Zealand from his native home of South Africa. His aesthetic in ceramics as typified by the piece on show can be loosely described as ‘derelict industrial’ and he wants the work to seem somehow familiar yet whose purpose ‘slides off the tip of the tongue’.
Fiona Mackay is an Auckland-based potter and maker of homeware. She is well known for her extremely precise minimalist aesthetic and muted colour palette. Her work on show exemplifies this aesthetic as well as the larger scale of vessel that she explored during her residency.
Jean-Nicolas Gérard is a world-renowned French potter working in the tradition of wood fired slipware. He considers himself an artisan craftsman with influences from Japanese ceramics to modern western expressionist painting.
Sung Hwan Bobby Park’s BTM ceramic helmets interrogates the South Korean military’s insidious attacks on queer personnel. After moving to NZ when he was 10 years old, Sung Hwan returned to South Korea in 2012 to complete his military service, in order to retain his Korean citizenship. His BTM (bangtan mo or ‘bulletproof’) helmets embody the fragility of queer identity under Korea’s conservative government.
Zoë Isaacs is a Wellington based potter who took up residency at ASP shortly after completing her ceramics diploma from Otago Polytechnic which is run through ASP in Auckland. She took full advantage of the studio space and focused time offered by the residency programme to define her own personal aesthetic and to gain the confidence to embark on her own studio and commercial practice.
Joanne Raill is a ceramicist who uses clay to explore her horticultural and life philosophies focusing on change and the role that chance plays in the process of natural growth and hand made things. She is intimately attracted to the way that clay holds the gestures and marks of the making process.
Iza Lozano is an artist from Mexico whose works are inspired by archaeological objects from multiple cultural origins. Using the potter’s wheel and terracotta or stoneware clay, her forms are often burnished with the help of rocks, spoons, and/or blades, leaving a smooth surface on the naked clay with the trace of the orbital motion of the wheel.
Anna Crichton is an award-winning satirical illustrator whose illustrations have made their way onto and into her ceramic pieces. She is an experimental artist at heart in both form and decoration, never becoming stagnant and always looking for new ways to innovate and comment on current events.
John Dawson is a New Zealand/British ceramicist working exclusively with porcelain. Professionally trained as a musician and as a visual artist, he creates vessels using the principles of Baroque musical form whereby a simple chord structure is laid out by the composer and then embellished by the performer to add movement and emotion. His unglazed and polished agate ware has become highly sought after by collectors and pot lovers.
