About exhibition

Created over 6-weeks of trips to the Tāmaki Estuary, Rubes Prattley-Jones and Taarn Scott present salt crusted, a collaborative project drawing on their shared love of collective making and beach fossicking.

Rubes explores their relationship with the Tāmaki Estuary coastline using wild clay sourced on location, capturing the texture of beach and artist. Connecting their queer identity to place, Rubes aligns bodily with the estuarine landscape, fluid and non-binary.

Taarn’s practice draws inspiration from the built environment; shelter and habitat. For salt crusted they’ve mused on sand timers and shacks, lighthouses and postcards and the layered histories of place. Abstracting their textures in metal and cast bronze.

Read the full exhibition text here.

About Rubes’s work

Traces of the beach embedded in clay, molded to the shape of the artists’ hands and pressed against coastal textures. Squishing, twisting, adjusting, adding, pinching away. Estuarine beach and queer body combined, almost indistinguishable from one other; merging, collaborating.

Fingerprints look a lot like shell prints; ridges, signals of past seasons and events. Viewers are invited to touch these pieces, fitting fingers to where the artists’ were once placed, or where clay was pressed against eroded stone, rusted metal, sand, brackish water.

Works by Rubes

Holding Brackish Water: Ceramics using wild clay, white glaze with sediment, ochre, sea glass, and found objects, from Tāmaki Estuary beaches

Holding Brackish Water (touch me): Ceramics using wild clay, white glaze with sediment, ochre, sea glass, and found objects, from Tāmaki Estuary beaches

Photographs by Natalie Jane Koren