Award goes to 'painter in three dimensions'

By JANET HUNT

Penny Ericson describes herself as "a painter in three dimensions". Although she is known for her work in ceramics, her passion for three-dimensional creations begins not in her studio but in the soil and clay of the home she shares with husband Ray on Waiheke Island.

Like her studio work, the cliff-top section - which looks north and east towards Coromandel and the islands of the Hauraki Gulf - is a work in progress. Ericson is a superb and dedicated gardener, one who sculpts first and shapes with walls, pergolas and paths and then, as in her ceramics, decorates the surfaces and spaces she has created with line, texture and colour.

This month, Ericson's work Six Days in a Southern Landscape received the $10,000 premier prize at the third annual Portage Ceramic Awards at Lopdell House in Titirangi. The awards are a national event, the most prestigious ceramic exhibition since the winding up of the Fletcher Challenge Ceramic Award in 1998. This year's selector and judge was Australian artist Julie Bartholomew.

Ericson was surprised and delighted. Although a piece was accepted for the Fletcher Challenge Awards in 1997, this was the first time she had submitted work to the Portage Awards. "For me, it was a privilege just to be there," she says.

A specialist art teacher and lecturer with a solid CV of exhibitions and awards, including a formative period of study with Australian Owen Rye, Ericson has been working with clay since the early 1990s.

She has never thought of herself as anything other than a ceramic artist, a maker of pieces with sculptural qualities with a strong foundation in ceramic and decorative traditions.

She says the function of her work is aesthetic rather than utilitarian, and is strongly influenced by painting. In particular, her winning piece was inspired by Colin McCahon's 1950 painting Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury.

Like McCahon, Ericson is drawn to the rudimentary shapes of hills and mountains. Her work echoes the combination of underlying geological structure and surface layerings in her renditions of form and texture, the basic forms providing "a wonderful vehicle for decoration, for surface techniques".

The solid masses of the land and their near-flat horizon lines are important, she says. The sense of land above and the invisible below. "It's very powerful. It sinks into your subconscious."

The paintings of Gretchen Albrecht are also an acknowledged influence: Six Days in a Southern Landscape comprises six precisely placed forms, each a shallow three-dimensional hemisphere cleft down the middle. They are hollow, slab-built in white earthenware clay, decorated with slip glaze and fired, sometimes many times, at higher temperatures than is usual for earthenware.

Viewed from the side, the hemispheres resemble a range of coastal hills or islands, a series of folds and uplifts receding, possibly infinitely, into the distance. They are multiples, offering in their sameness the opportunity for Ericson to experiment and explore variations in surface detail.

Each has a contrasting texture and, apart from the first, which is coffee-grey, they are glazed in a similar pale creamy tone. Shapes one and three are marked with a pattern like tiny roses, reminiscent of fabric or wallpaper, shape two is cross-hatched as if drawn upon in pen, shape four is ribbed like a shell, shape five is raked with fine hair or rain lines, and shape six is almost smooth, like patterns of intersecting ripples flattening on water.

For each, there is a transition through the process of creation which reflects Ericson's fascination with the relationships of underlying form to surface, from the large physical effort involved in making the shapes through to the more intricate, smaller completion stages of applying glaze and texture.

Even the relationships of component pieces are fluid, organic. As they are made, in the businesses of shaping, drying, glazing and firing, they are moved around and suggest or acquire new associations, develop connections and finally, groupings.

Ericson describes herself as quiet and reflective, "the kind of person who likes to walk beaches and collect pebbles". She feels this quality of stillness and peace is also to be found in her work.

"I believe art forms should say something about process and medium but also should be about their maker - the most effective are those which are truest to their creator, that say something about me as a person."

She is still coming to terms with her win: "It was wonderful to walk in and see the pieces at the Portage Ceramic Awards," she says. "They had positioned them beautifully, centrally located at exactly the right height."

The award will increase her confidence, although she doubts it will alter much - her practice has a motivation and reward which is not influenced by exhibition success or critical acclaim.

"You make works because they give you joy," she says simply.

Ericson is working on pieces which appear to turn the hemispheres of Six Days in a Southern Landscape on their tails, with added leaf-like structures along their curved edge that are inspired by plants called Spiny Spaniards, denizens of the barren tussock zones.

Surprisingly, despite their connection and attraction, she has never looked to plant forms before. They will be on display at the Ellerslie Garden Show.

* What: The Portage Ceramic Awards 2003

* Where: Lopdell House, Titirangi

* When: Until December 7