Pottery award aims to break the mould

By GREG TREADWELL

If teapots are your taste, forget the Waiheke Ceramic Award. There aren't any. Neither will you find a lot of plates, bowls or jugs there.

This new venture at the Waiheke Gallery puts tableware, while paying it no disrespect, back on the kitchen shelf.

Driven instead, in selection and judging, by a criterion of "innovation", the new, $3000 nationwide award for ceramic artists set out to stir up some new ideas and challenge some fundamental ones about pottery.

"The quality of the work had to be there to start with, but we were looking for innovation, either within ceramics in New Zealand or innovation within a particular artist's oeuvre," says gallery manager Jackie O'Brien.

Sponsors Kay and Lance Peterson were looking to move their sponsorship from an invited show - they supported the ceramics show Natural Selection - to an award.

But a lot of discussion centred on the sameness of other awards, says O'Brien.

"We also wanted to present an opportunity for artists not necessarily very well known to have a chance to exhibit, which is something you don't see in other awards."

Judge Peter Lange - renowned ceramicist and director of the Auckland Studio of Potters - admits the selection process, which cut 90-odd entries to 25, meant some pretty well known names were left out.

"Would I want to own this piece?", the phrase Lange calls the "covet test", was replaced in this case by the "intrigue test" - does it offer a sense of the unexpected?

"Many of the unselected works would have breezed into the New Zealand Society of Potters national exhibition had I been selecting it because they are beautiful, well-made pieces, but the Waiheke organisers are keen for this award to become established as a showcase for work which extends the artist and poses questions for the viewer."

Which meant, for example, Big Pegs by Paul Maseyk, a wall piece based on the trivia of domesticity, made the final cut rather than the more expected household arena for pottery.

"I'm having a stint of object enlargement," says Maseyk cheerfully in notes accompanying the work. "Pegs are a current obsession."

Acclaimed potter Ann Verdcourt, working on what she calls the "disappointment" of fired colours, went for two-letter words on which to express them.

Her work Um sits like a question resonating through the show. "I decided to use two-letter words that frequently command more space in the dictionary than those with several syllables.

"Um was never in any of my school dictionaries, so I decided to celebrate its inclusion."

Award-winner John Roy, whose work has been selected for other awards, says he was getting tired of the "rabbit men" complete with floppy ears he had been making and welcomed the chance to be innovative.

"I'm constantly trying to get some content into the work, having the work talk about things other than itself," he says.

Of his two works selected, he won the premier, $3000 cash prize for Man with Funnel. His other work, ironically named in the context of the award, was Man Impaled on Vessel.

Roy says he began with vessels but became more interested in figurative work, "talking about something, rather than making a good teapot".

Man with Funnel, says Lange, had a strange "enigmatic" quality.

Its scale was "like something our parents used to have in figurines on the mantelpiece. There was an amount of pathos and almost desperation about it that was just compelling."

He admits it was a little embarrassing to reject perfectly good pots from well-known artists, but they simply didn't break new ground, either in their own career or in the wider context of New Zealand ceramics.

Which didn't, he notes, entirely exclude domestic ware - so there were a couple of pots and a jug selected. Indeed, Christine Thacker's Jug of Pure Water and Marie Strauss' Dark Bowl were among six merit winners.

Exhibition

* What: Waiheke Ceramic Award

* Where and when: Waiheke Community Art Gallery, Artworks, Oceanview Rd, Oneroa, Waiheke Island; to June 2.