This exhibition is now closed
Cheryl Lucas: Shaped by Schist and Scoria
27 August –
4 December 2022
Cheryl Lucas Subterfuge 9 (detail) 2022. Ceramic. Courtesy of The National and McLeavey Gallery
Seductive surfaces and tough issues – these are ceramics made for the eyes and mind.
In plants, densely interlaced zig-zags offer protection from predators and climatic challenges. In sculptures, they offer excitement; opening up the possibilities of object making in captivating new directions. In riotously glazed works fresh from her Ōhinehou Lyttelton studio, renowned ceramic artist Cheryl Lucas co-opts the distinctive, dynamic forms of Aotearoa’s divaricating shrubs, likening their defensive tangles to our necessary isolation during Covid-19. Accompanying these never-before-seen pieces are four significant installations selected from Lucas’s extraordinary four-decade career. All explore a range of contemporary issues, from the environmental impact of intensive dairying to the loss and destruction that followed the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes.
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Commentary
Improvising Protection
It is mid-winter, and Cheryl Lucas is making work right down to the wire. The survey Shaped by Schist and Scoria opens at the end of August, and she has been working without a break since being awarded the Creative New Zealand Craft/Object Fellowship in 2019. This timespan, which will be inevitably thought of as the start of the Covid years, saw Lucas develop a new body of work that responded to a deep need, personal and societal, for protection while continuing to take risks. Protection from contagions, from financial hardship, food insecurity, the cost of living, global warming, economic recession and the violence that invariably attends disasters, big and small. Protection from whatever is coming at you. But not to deflect it, to integrate it, to use it as fuel. Grist to the mill.
Interview
Raising the Clay
One of the themes explored in the Gallery’s new exhibition Leaving for Work is local industry, particularly in relation to pottery. The show includes an 1896 painting by Charles Kidson of well-known early Sydenham potter Luke Adams; three late nineteenth-century pots by Adams; and projections of a number of exceptional photographs by Steffano Webb. Keen to learn more, exhibition curator Ken Hall met up with local pottery historian Barry Hancox – perhaps best-known as former Smith’s Bookshop proprietor – and leading New Zealand photographer, Oxford-based Mark Adams. Mark’s links to this story include a distant family connection to Luke Adams; photographing many celebrated New Zealand potters of the 1970s and 1980s; and an abiding interest in land and memory.
Interview
A Passion for Clay and Pots
In recent months, retired potter and former president of the Canterbury Potters’ Association, Rex Valentine – a man passionate about clay – and art consultant Grant Banbury have been working behind-the-scenes in the Gallery alongside registration, curatorial and conservation staff. They’ve been assisting with an audit of a part of the collection that we’re excited to be working with more – the Gallery’s ceramics holdings.
Here Banbury and Valentine discuss the latter’s own production and involvement in pottery circles in Canterbury from the late 1960s to the 1980s; his time spent in studying pottery in Japan, and his involvement with pottery acquisitions during Brian Muir’s directorship of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. The edited extracts that follow are from an interview recorded at Valentine’s home in Christchurch on 10 April 2021.
Collection
Barry Brickell Loco boiler (with alternative stacks for warming the hands)
Barry Brickell began working with clay at the age of fifteen in 1950 and the following year built his first kiln at his parents’ home in Devonport, Auckland. He started exhibiting his pots in 1955. After a two-term stint in 1961 teaching high school art and science in the Coromandel, he resigned and set out to become a full-time potter. After purchasing a small block of land in the area, he also embarked on the creation of his renowned Driving Creek Railway and Potteries complex. In 1975 construction got under way on an elaborate 266mm gauge railway that was originally intended for transporting clay and firewood fuel to his studio and kilns but later became a visitor attraction. Loco boiler, which seems to encapsulate Brickell’s lifelong dual fascination with steam engines and the possibilities of clay, was purchased from the New Zealand Society of Potters exhibition in Christchurch in 1976.
(Leaving for Work 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)
