Clay on the Whanganui riverbank
In the river city of Whanganui, history pools. Decades swirl together like creative eddies, made visible in the diverse, rich heritage architecture, cloaking a heart that can also be at once conservative and provincial.
This, mind you, is a town whose mayor once had ‘‘the life and work of David Bowie’’ as a Mastermind topic.
This architectural pool is crowned by a neoclassical glory, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua, on a hill that was once Pukenamu Pā . From the gallery, which is due to reopen with a major extension next spring, you look out over an array of distinctive civic buildings, as if it were a curated collection. Heritage and the arts come together here in design.
Whanganui is known for its glass artists, but for me it’s even more a place of ceramics. I imagine the clay in that brown river water settling, river swirls collecting on the pottery wheel. Transportation was once dominated here by boats (the subject of a current Sarjeant exhibition) and so vessels dominate arts production: pots, plates, bowls, goblets and cups. Adventurous structures to hold things.
Up on Pukenamu there’s a peace memorial devised by Ross Mitchell-Anyon, a local potter and former councillor who has saved many historic buildings. Six thousand handprints embedded in ceramic tiles form a giant spiral.
In this way artists roll up their sleeves and invest in the city’s heritage. Just down the hill in the Edwardian stone Druids Hall is WHMilbank Gallery. After 28 years of directing the Sarjeant, Bill Millbank got sidelined by a very different kind of mayor over the gallery extension project. He continues to provide space for many fine artists.
Then, just across the way next to the Moutoa Gardens, ceramicist Rick Rudd cares for a less conventional but no less interesting piece of heritage: a distinctive 1960s office building with a 1979 first-floor addition. It offers a home, framing and – with all-round windows – floods of light to more than 1000 pieces of contemporary and historic ceramics. Building and collection are as one here in demonstrating excellence and innovation in design, beyond fashion.
Rudd opened the Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics in 2015 to show his own collection of work. It bends the bounds of form and function with sinuous line and sharp wit. Rudd’s collection of others’ work, however, is such that he also showcases significant bodies of work by some of our finest ceramicists, and can present, animatedly in one modest room, a history of Aotearoa studio ceramics.
This effort got turbocharged in 2019 by the bequeathing of the remarkable collection of late Wellington collector Simon Manchester. In one room exhibited currently are works by four contemporary potters who love to play sharply, gleefully with art and social history: Richard Stratton, Martin Poppelwell, Paul Maseyk and Andy Kingston.
Next door is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of Manchester work, demonstrating his wide-ranging strong eye for new ideas: from Dane Mitchell to Wi Taepa.
Elsewhere Rudd has curated rooms dedicated to John Parker, Elizabeth Lissaman, Len Castle and Anneke Boren, each artist surprising me with the boldness and diversity of their practices over time.
It’s getting crowded here, but Rudd has a strong eye for arrangement. And I like how these displays counter the minimalism of the white cube gallery. Currently in a bank vault downstairs is a well presented array of Mitchell-Anyon’s fine but more utilitarian mugs, teapots and bowls.
Mā ori ceramics is an area of collection Quartz could strengthen, making all the more welcome its strength in the Rick Rudd Foundation-sponsored National Emerging Practitioner in Clay Award.
HineWaiKerekere’s winning work, Kererū i roto i te nikau, might seem cheesy given its subject, if not for the jewel-like sophistication of the glazing, the audacious blend of distinctive techniques and the use of varied clays. The work is of this whenua, yet ornate like a ceremonial chalice.
The 29 works presented speak to the diversity of new practice: from recent Elam graduate Rose Bourke’s repetitive tower stacking of rough bulging clay rings, embodying human growth, to Angus Horne’s revision of Mā ori-derived pattern in 3D printed terracotta. And in testament to the growing ceramics community in Whanganui, the winner of this award in 2018, Oliver Morse, has since moved to Whanganui. His work presented here is all spidery scrimshaw-like figurative drawing on vessels. They have a human fragility expressing an emotional, almost diaristic response through touch.
Ceramics abound elsewhere. Across town pop art ceramicists Rayner Brothers show artists at 85 Glasgow St. And from Quartz it’s a quick stroll to the river and the Wanganui Potters Society HQ, and nearby studio potters Light and Vessel.
Round the corner, it’s the last weekend at the Sarjeant Gallery of the remarkable touring Julia Morison installation Head[case]. A maze of black shelves host disturbing alien headforms; ceramic vessels for psychic leakages through appendages that range from saggy breasts and spinal cords to antennae and taps, suggestive of occult trepanning rituals.
Emerging Practitioner in Clay Award 2021, Quartz Museum of Ceramic Art, until April 3. Headcase, Julia Morison, Sarjeant Gallery, until October 24.