Sisters combine for new work

I’m happiest wearing goggles and steel-capped boots and working at my machines. Amy Lynch

Two British sisters now living in Hawke’s Bay, Amy Lynch and Katie Baptiste, are collaborating on a large sculpture in metal which when completed will be shown at the Wildflower Sculpture Exhibition in November.

Calling it The Ample Pear, their design is suggestive of feminine form and a play on words.

It is the first project Amy and Katie have worked on together as it’s the first time they have been geographically close enough. They are both designers who trained and worked in their various specialist fields in the UK before coming to New Zealand, Amy with her NZ husband Josh in 2004 and Katie and husband Darron just over three years ago. They both love living and working here in the Bay and are overjoyed to have their mother also come to join them in Hawke’s Bay.

The Ample Pear design came about originally through a brief for another project. They played with ideas and realised they could produce an original and technically challenging artform by combining their different skills and were delighted at the prospect of showing it at the Cranford Hospice fundraiser, the Wildflower Sculpture Exhibition.

Katie is a surface pattern designer. In the UK she worked in automotive design, as a colour, materials and finishes designer for Bentley & Jaguar. Amy, a creative maker, came to Hawke’s Bay to be part of a group of makers based in Whakatu. She has a background in product and furniture design from the UK. She then became part of the David Trubridge team and was the only female on-site initially. Even though she was working alongside a whole group of men, they knew she would keep up and offer valued design ideas.

“It’s where I’m at my best, I’m happiest wearing goggles and steel-capped boots and working at my machines. I learnt so much at Whakatu in 10 years,” she says.

“We’ve had a very practical upbringing, both our parents are very practically oriented,” says Katie.

“Learning either in the workshop or kitchen table. Our parents were both doctors but outside of the world of medicine they were both very practical — we had great teachers!”

Their Ample Pear collaboration will be a curvaceous metal form some 2.5 metres tall when finished. Its colour will come in the final finishing and a detailed illustration cut into the metal surface of the seed pods casting patterned shadows on to the interior curved surface.