Feats of clay

The new Portage Ceramics Awards are aimed at keeping the tradition of pottery-making alive, writes BERNADETTE RAE.

The judge of the newly fledged Portage Ceramic Awards, Mitsuo Shoji, who flew in from Sydney to allocate the $16,000 of prizes just announced, has won just two such awards himself during an illustrious 30-year-career as a ceramics artist.

It is like a lottery, he says, of winning ceramic awards.

If that is the case, Shoji is on a roll. He has only ever entered three competitions.

His first try was an entry in the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Awards and his work was rejected in the first round.

A few years later, aged 36, and because that year, 1982, was the Year of the Dog and Shoji's special year, he had another go, this time in the Faenza awards, in Italy. He won.

Twelve years later, and in the next Dog Year, in 1994, he again entered the Fletcher Challenge Awards. And won.

And his next try will be?

"In 2006, the next Year of the Dog," he says firmly. "I will win again when I am 60 years old."

But his horoscope theory of winning ceramics awards does not make Shoji a flippant sort of judge, just one who is aware that the judging process can be only a matter of opinion.

"Every person has different opinions, different ideas," he says. "The real value of these competitions is to be able to compare your work with that of others, to realise the different directions and see how different people do things."

Shoji's choice for the Open Premier Award, worth $10,000, is an imaginative pair of pieces from Lyttelton artist Tony Bond, in high-fired earthenware and entitled Qumbilicum and Qumbilicum II.

He describes the work as "strange, different and beautifully executed".

The $3000 Open Award of Merit went to Chris Weaver of Hokitika, for his exquisite Teapot, in salt-fired white clay with wood.

Lauren Winstone, of Auckland, captured the $2000 Emergent Artist Award with her Composition with Vase, a collection of quaint, miniature domestic items, in a medium described as a combination of found, recycled and terracotta clay.

Ted Dutch won the $1000 Waitakere City Artist Award with his King and Queen of Signallers, humorous figures in hand-built porcelain.

The new Portage Ceramics Awards are a joint initiative of the Portage Charitable Foundation and the Lopdell House Gallery, devised to fill the gap left by the demise of the Fletcher Challenge competition in 1998 and to keep the considerable tradition of pottery-making alive in the West.

More than 120 entries were received, in the form of 35mm colour transparencies, from all over New Zealand.

Curators Mary Holehan and Moyra Elliott whittled that number down to 48 artists and about 75 items, which were then collected and spread out, amid considerable secrecy, in the Lopdell House hall, for the inspection of Shoji.

Ceramics come in two main categories: "functional" items such as pots and plates; and "experimental" or sculptural forms.

Judging them in one broad band did not make Shoji's job any easier.

His main criteria were the technical quality of the craftsmanship and the merit of the artistic concept.

He made his first choice quite easily, he says, for its originality of form and technical excellence. The perfection of finish marks out the merit award from other similarly eye-catching entries. Sheer creativity and a "sense of fun" influenced his choices for the other awards.

Shoji's own work, held in fine collections all over the world, covers a broad spectrum of expression. He regularly exhibits fine tableware but also makes large-scale vessels and sculptural objects.

His earliest training as a painter finds expression in his "ceramic paintings" in which he uses a blowtorch and kiln burners to create a matt black surface on board, adorned with gold and silver leaf, burned in, with additional colour added through crayon and paint.

He trained at the Art Institute of Osaka City Museum and Nakanoshima School of Arts in Osaka, then at the prestigious Kyoto City University of Fine Arts.

He has been based in Australia since 1973 and teaches at the Sydney College of Arts, University of Sydney.

* The Portage Ceramic Awards 2001 exhibition runs at the Lopdell House Gallery until October 7.