Grant helps Lange push career in unorthodox directions

Peter Lange makes an ironic and aesthetic point with his large brick dart. Picture / Greg Bowker

Peter Lange has a thing about bricks. He is fascinated by them, but they have to be able to do unbrickish things, like make curves and go round corners.

Three years ago, he astounded passersby at the Viaduct Basin by launching the maiden voyage of the world's first brick boat, the 6m Anagama. Contrary to the many doubters, Anagama floated.

A large brick arrow pierces down into Lange's front garden, which has piles of bricks stacked around it. And now he has received the $65,000 Creative New Zealand Craft/Object Art Fellowship, Lange can afford to be more inventive with bricks - if he wants to.

At the moment, he is having to deal simultaneously with his older brother David's illness as well as the news of the fellowship.

"This grant, I just can't believe it," says Lange who, at 60, has been a leading figure in New Zealand pottery and ceramics since the early 80s.

"I feel a bit nervous about it. It's a huge honour but it also implies expectations. It's a pretty treacherous path ahead in some ways - you can fall flat on your face. I'm just going to do what I do, which is make stuff."

Lange has just returned from an international ceramics symposium in Wales where he demonstrated the unpredictability of kilns made of wood - and ice. They don't last long, apparently. "It was quite exciting," notes Lange dryly.

He also delivered a multi-media lecture, entitled the Slideshow From Hell, intended as a swipe against the boring scourge of PowerPoint.

"I hate them - nothing can go wrong with them. Half the reason for going to a slideshow is the expectation that there will be a slide upside down, or back to front, or out of focus, so I do the whole lot in my slideshow so it's almost vaudevillean. We blow up the bulb, drop a carousel of slides. It's quite funny."

"Funny" is a word which could apply to Lange's career, a word he didn't think he could ever apply to his life.

He did "all the usual stuff" in the 60s, when he had no qualifications and earned an erratic living working on building sites and meat works, and prospecting for gold in the Coromandel - where he met pottery legend Barry Brickell.

He and his wife Ro travelled the hippy route overland to Britain, where they worked in Buckingham Palace; she as a housekeeper, he as a silver polisher.

Back home after five years away, Lange got into pottery - something he had no interest in - by accident. It was the 1970s, he had a couple of friends with a kiln and the market was booming.

"Anything you made that was brown and had a hole in the middle sold," he recalls. "Mine was bad, to be honest, because I was just starting."

Lange became good at throwing, then he got bored. "Technical expertise is okay but it gets a bit tedious. I became very skilled as a thrower so you end up making a whole lot of cups that look the same.

"Then I went to a lot of trouble to unlearn that, or at least I never did unlearn it because I can't stop throwing straight, but I put a wobble into it, deliberately at the end."

Throwing a wobble could be a metaphor for Lange's life. During the 1980s, he became contrary and segued from throwing mugs and brown casseroles into slipcasting distinctive - and adorable - objects, like his "fake superealistic" teapots that look as though they are made of things like sponges and plugs.

They don't look practical but they are: "I like things that have that Presbyterian thing. They need to work."

During the 90s, Lange progressed into stand-alone "sculptural" pieces. This is where he has some difficulty with the delineation between craft/object - as in the title of the fellowship - and art, as in sculpture.

"It's the craft/art debate all over again. How far is the craft/object thing removed from sculpture? It's a tough one. This is a dilemma for someone like me."

Many people find Lange's pieces humorous but he prefers the less obvious route of irony.

"I'm not looking to make people laugh. I am making a point but also when you make something humorous or even slightly funny, it's a bit like producing a record of jokes. You can listen to it once or twice but you don't want to hear it again.

"You've got to make something that transcends that, has a certain substance or an aesthetic quality."

Lange has no specific plans for the work he will produce with the fellowship but bricks are likely to be in the mix somewhere. "I want to work on bricks that are smaller in scale.

"When I was a kid I used to spend hours playing with mah-jong pieces, which are kind of like little bricks. I think I'm quite capable of spending a year down in the shed playing with bricks.

"As I get older I'll probably make smaller and smaller things. I've chosen bricks at the very time of my life when I shouldn't be doing it," he laughs. "I should have done it 30 years ago, when I was a lot fitter and stronger."