Peter Lange's Lilo.
Art
Feats of clay
by Tessa Laird
Why Auckland is teeming with “the new pottery”.
Ceramic art is rapidly gaining cachet in the fine-art world. New York ceramics dealer and critic Garth Clark spoke recently at the Auckland War Memorial Museum about the opening up of “fortress ceramica”. Artists are poaching potters’ territory – witness Walters Prize winner Francis Upritchard’s ceramic urns and lampshades. Similarly, ceramicists (Clark’s preferred term) are being recognised as artists – most notably Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry.
Early this year, Anna Bibby held a show of mainly non-ceramic artists’ experimentations with clay, and currently Auckland is teeming with pots on pedestals.
The Gus Fisher is showing traditional Japanese-inspired pottery with Kamaka: The Ceramics of Bruce and Estelle Martin, which was launched by Peter Lange.
Lange won the premier award at the Portage Awards at Titirangi’s Lopdell House for his brick and concrete Lilo. Like many of his works, Lilo wreaks havoc on viewer expectation of the heavy/light dichotomy. It reminded me of Rick Killeen’s digital paintings featuring hybrids of humans and buildings. UK ceramicist Anthony Gormley uses clay specifically destined to become bricks, “liberating” it from a wall-bound fate. Lange doesn’t liberate clay from brickdom; he brings working-class bricks into the high-class realm of sculpture, but possessing a wit that Carl Andre never had.
Also at the Portage and satisfyingly solid, Matt McLean’s Soft Landing: two chunks of contrasting earthenware interlocking like vertebrae or tectonic plates. There are more of McLean’s stacks on show in his garden in Grey Lynn, but it’s unlikely that anyone will have the muscle to make off with these behemoths. In stark contrast, dinky handbags seemed to be a favourite theme among some female ceramicists, culminating in Katie Gold’s Walk in the Park, a paean to feminine accessorising.
Though the Portage provides a snapshot of what’s going on in contemporary New Zealand ceramics, it can’t provide a close-up of any one artist. This is what Imaginary Friends at Objectspace does so well. Profiling a recent series by Janet Green inspired by the ancient Buddhist temple of Borobudur, Imaginary Friends combines hand-built Buddhas, stupas and conch shells in a white crackled glaze that looks bleached with time. Most charming of all are her “ancestor” figures, wise simians sporting Bodhisattva topknots.
This anachronism works, since Buddhism proposes a spiritual evolution, one that may take many thousands of years to fulfil. Perhaps humans are nothing more than beatific primates, like Green’s elegant combinations of the animal with the divine. But elegance can be distancing – though these figures were sprinkled with cherry blossoms on opening night, I would love to see them strangled by vines, blackened by incense and greasy from the touch of countless human hands.
Running concurrently with Imaginary Friends is Parallel Universe at Anna Miles Gallery. Miles has used two of the ceramicist’s ancestor figures as a leaping-off point for a group show of pairs. Here, Green’s simians sport teapots in place of topknots, and a cultured atmos-phere prevails throughout the show.
Miles showcases a range of pots and jewellery on antique parlour furniture, annotated with handwritten cards, like a slightly outré museum of applied arts. Bronwyn Cornish’s His and Hers Guardians are mythological creatures, part cherub, part dragon. Also ceramic guardians of sorts are Darren Glass’s photographs of searchlight emplacements built around Auckland in WWII.
But the showstopper is Richard Stratton’s pair of teapots, Little Boy and Little Girl. Taking name and shape from the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Stratton’s teapots explode with messages. They are perfectly fashioned and richly decorated, crowned with the kewpies that topped off crocheted toilet-roll covers. Stratton’s wares exude a multi-layered, candy-coloured, seductive menace; we have found our Perry.
KAMAKA: THE CERAMICS OF BRUCE AND ESTELLE MARTIN, Gus Fisher Gallery (until December 22)
PORTAGE CERAMIC AWARDS, Lopdell House (until December 3)
IMAGINARY FRIENDS, Objectspace (until December 2)
PARALLEL UNIVERSE, Anna Miles Gallery (until November 25)
