Andrea du Chatenier ceramics exhibiting now at Quartz

Andrea du Chatenier with some of her work at Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics. Photos / Paul Brooks

Exhibiting at the moment at Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics is work by Whanganui potter Andrea du Chatenier.

Amongst her many accolades and awards, Andrea is one of the two recipients of the recently announced Dame Doreen's Gift for 2022 (The Blumhardt Foundation).

"Two practitioners a year are honoured with the $10,000 gift," she says. "It's sort of an acknowledgement that what you are doing is interesting."

She also has work on display in A Gallery in the 85 Glasgow St Art Centre.

Rick Rudd, custodian and curator of Quartz, and Andrea have history. She used his Castlecliff kiln to fire her first works.

"Even though I was a novice and it might have ruined his kiln," she says.

That would have been about 2013. Andrea has achieved an awful lot in the few years since her ceramics debut.

"I am very privileged to have a show here, in my home town, at Quartz," she says. "The best thing is that the work is in a permanent collection."

"I think Andrea is one of the most exciting workers in clay in New Zealand," says Rick.

"I know there are people who admire my work," says Andrea, "And I find that lovely and a little surprising, because I am new, only 10 years, and my work is all very experimental."

Andrea's work shows consistency but variety, says Rick Rudd.

Andrea works part-time as a tutor at UCOL but manages to spend a lot of time in her studio. "I have a small life and a big, big focus on this thing. It brings me a lot of joy making stuff."

Andrea has always been an object maker, a sculptor, but working in clay came much later.

"At art school you use clay as a modelling material that you then cast and make bronzes and things from. So we did clay work ... and my father made ceramics, so we had them everywhere. Tiles in the bathroom and kitchen, lampshades, doorknobs, goblets, ceramic bowls, the medallions, rings ... he was technically very good, quite refined."

By day he was an accountant.

It was when Andrea looked at the clay pieces she was using for modelling — representational pieces — and thought she could probably hollow them out and fire them.

The thing was getting them fired immediately, and not joining a queue and waiting for a kiln to fill.

"And that's when Rick came in and helped me," she says.

Word Stack from last year.

"I'm pleased it was the beginning of something," says Rick.

Of course, what Andrea was making then is so very different from what she makes now, he says. "It's not the same person's work, in a way."

"It was more representational, figuration, and I was trying to make those forms look like certain things," she says. "Whereas now I'm loving clay and the material, the experimenting, the feel and what it can do. It's quite a different approach to making.

"And there's a risk factor in the work ... I don't know whether it will work, or stick to the kiln shelf and ruin it, but I do it anyway."

The award-winning Yellow Stack.

A piece in the exhibition is High Priestess from 2020.

"That's at least six firings," says Andrea. "And some quite complex firings in terms of shifting between stoneware, porcelain, glaze firings and then the glass firing."

It was important for Andrea to invest in her own kilns.

"My work is risk-taking and provisional: I don't care what happens. I have an idea of what I want to do and then something happens. Something might collapse and I'll refire it or tack something else on ... I like that nimbleness of making. Some people call it the Kiln Gods.

"There will always be a level of surprise when you open the kiln."

Andrea thinks of her work as quite "camp" ... "because of the use of colours and because of a slight irony in terms of thinking about the media, thinking of glass as silica, as being part of the glazing process ... there's always that testing of conventions.

"Plus, the colour range is seldom earthy, and at the moment I'm dealing with lustre glazes because they are so flamboyant. They are so iridescent and change with the light: they're a little bit disco, but not. That aspect of my work I feel is quite camp."

Rick says he sees a lot of humour in Andrea's work. "It's fun," he says. Andrea calls it "playful".

"The form and the thing that's being made is secondary to surface," says Andrea. "But it is a relationship between the two."

Andrea was personally invited to the biennial Clay Gulgong as an international ceramics master. The NSW event was in April — a week-long programme of potters demonstrating their work.

"I was very honoured ... it has been postponed for two years because of Covid."