‘A Void, Now Filled’ exhibition
The exhibition A Void, Now Filled is the culmination of my Auckland Studio Potters artist residency from May to July 2025. My approach was to focus on experimentation and creative play, resulting in an exploration of texture sourced directly from found objects in my surroundings. Impressions of natural materials, such as rocks and wood, as well as naturally eroded human-made items like chunks of concrete and rusty metal, were created by pressing soft clay directly onto the objects.
The materials I used to make the impressions came into my focus as a result of my repeated presence in their space. The pile of volcanic stones at Auckland Studio Potters that I constantly passed by during my residency, the lumpy sculptural forms found on the bedrock of the shore at my regular haunt Anderson’s Beach, and previously collected detritus from Karaka Bay Beach which helped inspire the exhibition In the Company of Water. A familiarization of these places changed my relationship to them, they hold a new meaning, making the everyday significant. These works record a sense of place.
In this body of work I focused on the texture of objects, the individual curves, points and indentations. The vessels I created capture an imprint of the space around the objects, the void left between the parts that were once, but are no longer there. My pieces reflect upon the actions, cataclysmic and sudden, slow and small, which shaped the objects. On the beaches the waves, the wind, sea creatures erode and eat away, on the land volcanic stones burst forth millennia ago in violent eruptions. Pushing against the objects the clay calls to these actions, then releases as a record of them.
The impressions often came away with incidental additions embedded in their surfaces, transferred from the objects themselves. A scattering of sand and shell shards, clumps of soil, pieces of metal and wood. Some of these burned away in the kiln, while others emerged through the glazes forming dark metallic specks. Amongst the sand and rocks of Karaka Bay Beach and Anderson’s Beach I collected sea glass in a multitude of colours, now pooling in the bottom of some of the ceramics. The sea glass and embedded materials bring small parts of the places where the pieces were created into the finished works.
In curating the exhibition space I bought into it some of the objects that had played roles in the creation of the ceramics, positioning them as I might find the boulders I clamber over on the sea shore. Pieces perched atop and amongst rubble and wood stumps, as if placed there by natural forces.
The following images show part of the process of some of the exhibited pieces, the impressions into clay, glazing, the addition of glass, and the finished artworks.
To see images of the exhibition installation, click here.
Auckland Studio Potters
Anderson’s Beach
Karaka Bay Beach
