It's been a long journey

But a very happy one

The window space at the Refinery ArtSpace.

Warning, reading this may be injurious to your long-term concentration. Give yourself a few days. I’ve gotten a bit carried away.

On Friday night we opened the hastily-assembled exhibition - Call of the Clay at the Refinery ArtSpace in Nelson. At least, in our minds it opened then. We’d previously had a small official opening on the previous Monday with the two artists in the other gallery spaces. On Friday night, it was just us. I say us, as although I throw, glaze and fire the pots, without my wife Cathie none of it would happen.

When we had the offer of the space, back in October, it seemed a daunting prospect. It’s a huge space to fill in a month. Now I’d like to start again and take twice as long, but that’s not going to happen.

Because I couldn’t open the exhibition twice, Friday night was officially branded as a floor talk.

Which meant I had to say something.

I’d rehearsed the general flow in my head for most of November, but a couple of days earlier, I decided to write it down. Even though I was never going to read it out, the act of writing is a great memory aid. 

The plan was to include a historical section, discuss how the various phases of my pottery career came about, and then wrap up with a description of how this old stuff led to what I’m doing now.

When I got to three pages and I’d only reached 1980, I gave up writing the speech and decided to wing it. It’s my life story - how could I imagine I’d ever squeeze it in to a short speech - or a short column for that matter.

On the floortalk night, I got so excited by the time I got to the end of my first phase as a potter in about 1993, that I read a poem and wrapped it up.

My friend Christina timed the speech at 16 minutes, so it was just as well I quit while I was ahead, although the faithful crowd (135 officially) was much too polite to start muttering.

On Saturday, after a nice coffee and muffin break with swimmers and a wander around the various places that now sell my pots (it’s growing day by day), we went home and I spent the rest of the day finishing some bud vases and throwing another couple of dozen beakers - they’re so popular that we think we’d better have some available as Christmas presents.

Then, armed with a beer, I was going to complete that speech with what I would have said if I had a couple of hours to bore people silly. (Retrospective note - didn’t finish then. It’s Monday now and I’m going to try to stop writing)

SPEECH (the long version)

Here I go, with a few of the pots in the historic section of the exhibition.

Me:

I’m very surprised to find myself here. 

I gave up making pots 30 years ago and said I’d never go back - it’s something I’d done and I was a bit burned out at the end of it.

Let me tell you how the twists and turns of life have brought me to this point.

When I was young, I had no artistic ability at all that I knew of.

I wanted to make things, but didn’t know how and there was no opportunity either at home or at school.

I read a lot, so also had vague leanings towards the creative and artistic.

There was no art department at Whangarei Boys High School from 1961-65.

I got funnelled into science and went off to Auckland University to fritter a few years away getting a science degree - mainly in maths.

I didn’t know what to do next, so went to Secondary Teachers Training College for a year in 1970.

In those days you were paid the princely sum of $2000 over the year.

As a mark of gratitude, you had to teach for at least a year, or repay them $200.

To broaden our horizons, they liked the science graduates to do something completely different for a few hours each week.

I found that there was a pottery option, taught by someone older potters will remember - Patricia Perrin.

She was focused on the art students, so as an outsider I had pretty much free run of the place to mess around.

During the course of that training year, you had to go out to a different school for a month each term.

On the first Monday of the first term I was sent to Manurewa College, where I turned up bright eyed and bushy tailed, clean clothes, fresh haircut, looking and feeling my best.

I was soon called into the headmasters office to be told my hair was too long and I had the rest of the day off to go and remedy the situation.

I went back to Training College to complain. 

It must have been fate, but they had just had a mayday call from a new and trendy school on the North Shore - Glenfield College.

Their head of maths had to go off to a conference in a couple of weeks and they needed a mathematician to fill in.

In the first period of Tuesday I had an interview with the headmaster, who decided that my hair wasn’t bad and led me to a classroom to watch a young biology teacher at work.

Old potters will also remember this fellow’s name - Chester Nealie.

It turned out that Chester was a bit of a potter. In previous years he’d built an oil-fired kiln at Westlake Boys High School, where he’d been teaching at the time.

He’d fired it on the previous Sunday. Now he had a free period and was off to crack the kiln - would I like to come?

One thing led to another.

After a week of observation, I taught maths classes for two weeks and impressed them enough to get a fulltime job there in 1971.

Bowl - 1971, fired in the Westlake kiln.

I had Chester to encourage me and pottery facilities at the school. I soon bought a Leach kick wheel from Leon Cohen at Seaboard Joinery in Ellerslie so I could work at home - a seaside cottage at Campbell’s Bay, for which we paid $10 a week rent (our next-door neighbour was Bert Potter, later of Albany commune fame).

Leon was so keen to have his wheels in use that he made me take one on the spot, even though I didn’t have enough money - he told me to pay it off when I sold some pots.

As a cocky young chap, I started teaching night classes at nearby Rangitoto College in 1972.

During that year, I met a young woman on a bus to Whangarei (I’d sold my car to raise a deposit on my house - if only that were still possible). She was going there to visit her aunt.

I imagined a little old lady with an electric kiln in the suburbs - something like the potter I’ve now become.

The aunt’s name was Yvonne Rust.

Yvonne Rust - what a gal.

Her pottery was perched high above Parua Bay, off the road out to Whangarei Heads.

She had a huge kiln built by Barry Brickell. It was beside her bed, which was also in the workshop.

It turned out that she was running summer schools during January 1973, so I signed up on the spot.

Potters will recognise names like Steve Fullmer and Richard Parker. Greg Barron was Yvonne’s assistant, sent there from Mirek Smisek, with whom Greg had been working.

I visited Yvonne often after that during school holidays and was invited to be her assistant for the 1974 schools, along with a chap called Ian Smail.

In any spare time, Ian and I built a small woodfired kiln, which didn’t really work.

This pot was first fired in a tiny wood-fired kiln at Parua Bay, later received a shower of glass from the 1979 Onekaka house fire and then was tidied up with a wood firing in Waimea West.

At the end of 1974 I quit my teaching job and launched out as a full-time potter in the basement and back-yard of my house in Murrays Bay. Incidentally, that house cost $10,500 to buy in 1972.

1975 wasn’t very old when I discovered that I was going to be a father later in the year.

I’d dreamed about getting out into the country and it seemed I’d better get on with it.

After casting about in Northland and Coromandel, I made a trip to Nelson and bought 14 acres in Onekaka, Golden Bay.

Onekaka was the site of an ambitious ironworks industry in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the ruins were the remains of two dozen large coke ovens, each shaped like a beehive and about three metres in diameter.

The local farmer would sell you the wonderful German firebricks for 10 cents each.

Somewhat brutally, he’d just drive his tractor in and scoop up a bucketful, not worrying how many were damaged in the process. After all, there were tens of thousands of them and who else would want them except a few hippy potters?

Mirek Smisek, for a start. Mirek’s famous beehive kilns in Te Horo were made from Onekaka bricks.

Mirek’s former assistant, Greg Barron, had bought land in Ironworks Rd and built a similar beehive kiln.

Greg was to become my closest potter neighbour, as I bulldozed a drive in from the road of my block and cleared enough of the kanuka to build a workshop and kiln.

I built a conventional oil-fired kiln with bisque chamber, using Onekaka bricks and fireclay from a road cutting near Parapara.

I used the kiln for glazed stoneware and later built a small catenary arch kiln for salt glazing.

One of the pots out of this kiln won a merit award in the 1979 Fletcher Brownbuilt Pottery Award, later to become the Fletcher Challenge exhibition, with one of the biggest prizes in the world at the time. 

At the same time, I was having a house built further up the hill.

Salt glazed jug. At the time, I thought that this jug was the best pot in the firing. The second best won a merit award in the Fletcher Brownbuilt awards.

Disaster struck later in 1979 when the house burned to the ground.

That slowed things down a bit.

We sold the land and moved to Waimea West. In August, a land agent showed us the house, occupied by potter Ross Richards and his wife Adrienne.

They’d been there a few years. In 1978, Ross had gone off to teach at Otago Polytech and Christine Boswijk lived there, making a start on her pottery career.

When they came back, they decided they needed something new.

We offered to buy the Waimea West property, but Adrienne said they weren’t ready to sell, they were just testing the market. However, if, in our quest, we found something they might like, they’d sell it to us.

In the fullness of time, we found the old house at Thackwood, which Ross and Adrienne bought, while we moved in to Waimea West.

That’s as far as I need to go with the speech notes, since I never got to read it out anyway.

I can take the story up with the text of an essay I wrote last year. 

To confuse the story of how I got to resume my pottery career, this essay played a pivotal role.

Whizzing through the 1980s, I worked hard on various things, including writing.

The writing took over in the 1990s and eventually I sold the pottery, moving into town to be closer to printers, photo studios and so on. Pre-internet it was hard to be a writer and publisher while living in the country.

But here’s the story about the period. It’s a large file and I’m not at all confident this link will work, but try anyway. Here it is

Be warned - it’s 155 pages long, but I’m getting tired of writing this column and I’m certainly not going to edit it. There was a far nicer looking version put together by artist Kirsty Cooper. Entitled The Golden Years, it was on the Clay Week website - but now it’s not

A quick summary. From 1979, after moving to Waimea West, a lot happened. By 1993, I was burned out and out of a job.

I got one (job) at a newspaper and worked away there very happily editing and doing page layout until I retired in 2015.

Fast forward to last year, when I was asked by my former next-door neighbour Janja, now working at Arts Council Nelson, to write the text that became The Golden Years.

After that, my good friend, potter Ralph Hetzel could see I was eager to start again, so he gave me his wheel.

Other friends, David and Karen, bequeathed me the kiln they’d carted around the world for 25 years and I started making pots again.

In October, Janja offered me a huge gallery space - and here we are.

What a long story.

I apologise, and I’ll do better in the future.

Actually, there’s more.

My old friend Jack Troy, potter and writer, has been encouraging and critiquing my comeback journey.

He sent me a poem to celebrate my rebirth, describing how we build our life on the life we had before, just as we build our pots on the experience of all the pots we’ve made before.

In the process, we become something new.

Here’s the poem:

Why don’t you make a pot and then

write a poem about it, she asked.

As if the clay, centered and opened,

its walls spinning round the still cavity,

might be a kind of mouth, and I,

listening, could capture something

rising from within.

Meanwhile the making continued,

the hands detouring past

the analytics of process,

as if another self, inside this one,

owned all the knowing.

There. Another cup done and set aside.

Another relative to the ones gone before –

something the first bequeathed the most recent.

And a silent chorus rising from them all:

Everything, they remind us,

used to be something else.

Thank you for reading. If you’re still there you deserve a medal.