Mr Minimalist

Theatre set designer and master potter John Parker tells
TIM WATKIN why he's taking a black and white approach to art.

John Parker sticks the fork in the dirt and strides over from the vege patch, pulling gardening gloves off his big, creative hands. He's been turning a patch of earth at his quiet west Auckland home so he can plant some dwarf butter beans, and is dressed in an old black T-shirt and black track pants.

Parker, renowned potter and set designer, kicks off his boots and invites us into the white open spaces of his home - white painted walls, white pillows in a white window seat and Parker's own white vases on display.

"I wanted the house to be like a gallery," he explains, saying the plain surrounds were intended as an ideal backdrop for colour. Problem is, shortly after the paint job he abandoned the use of colour in his pottery. The home exhibition offers only shades of white on white.

Add Parker's white cat, which struts over to its owner mewing for attention, and you could be forgiven for thinking Parker is a one-tone guy stuck in an artistic snowdrift. In fact, juggling his time between the theatre and the art galleries, Parker is an artist who has always got another project on the go.

Recently he's been back in black - black corsets and fishnets that is - designing the set and costumes for the musical Chicago that winds up its season in Auckland this weekend and heads south for stints in Wellington and Christchurch.

The show, Parker says, is about manipulation, the predicament of women and the cult of personality. Designing a set is all about serving that storyline.

That means he didn't feel bound to follow the set designs from the show's West End or Broadway runs. Apart from the eponymous setting and the 1920s jazz era, design boundaries were few.

"The only brief I was given was that I talk to the director [in London] - and we were on the same wavelength - and there was venue and there was budget. And there's the cast. That's it."

Of those considerations, venue provided the biggest challenge.

"The show's going to the Christchurch Town Hall; and it has to pack in and out three times during the season there because they're sub-letted to orchestras and things. And the St James [in Wellington] is much narrower than the Civic. So there are two configurations of the set. The wing apron parts have little wedges that just bring it in further for the smaller venue. It was all worked out like a Meccano set so that it could come down quickly and pack away."

Parker says although the script places the Chicago story in the 20s, local producers were purposefully vague about what decade the show was set in. Crime stories - from Mrs Bobbit's phallic attack to the terrorist attacks in the US - still have the power to shock, so the story has modern ramifications, he says.

"We were guided by the idea of it being 1920s-modern ... And the show was created in the 70s. So we're trying to do the 20s with resonances of the 70s and now."

For inspiration, Parker looked at film noir, the works of Scottish painter Jack Vitriano and period photos of Chicago. "Before 1928 there was a building boom, skyscrapers were going up. Those wonderful period photographs of guys having their lunch on beams. So that was the look I went for ... unclad steel, the skeleton of a skyscraper."

Parker's a bit of a builder himself when it comes to his sets. "I build models. I'm used to 3-D things. I make these things," he says, indicating the holed white bowl and ringed white vase that sit on his table. "Also a model can't lie. You can do a fabulous concept sketch and people think wow, but in actual fact you've made doorways that people can't walk through.

"So my first thing is to lay a plan out on the table, get out the matchboxes, cotton reels and my little model people and you fiddle around with bits of cardboard and work out the spatial relationships. You can interior decorate, make it look like anything later - steel, dripping, mouldy castle, whatever. But if you don't get the spatial relationships and the flow of people right, you're stuck."

This model-making, like the pottery, is the work of his hands, and those hands are working while we talk. They are spread and clenched. They pat the large stainless steel dining table where we sit, leaving finger smudges on the bare metal.

And as he chooses his words, those hands knead his face, looking for an answer as they would look for shape in the clay.

He first took up pottery in the 1960s as an antidote to his university study.

"At high school I was keen on being an interior decorator or something and you couldn't do that then. Men were not into those things. So I was sent to university doing maths, chemistry and physics, which I did not cope very well with. A friend went to a pottery night school class, so I went to that. That became my solace."

He escaped to teacher training college and did well. However, after a year's teaching to pay back his bond, he went to study at the the Royal College of Art in London. On the basis that there was nowhere in New Zealand you could do a degree in ceramics, and some photographs of his work at exhibitions here, he was somehow accepted into the MA course.

He could now do the things men didn't do. "It was the 70s. Things were different by then, it was the height of the craft revival movement. And I suppose I was bloody-minded."

After four years in London, he returned to make ceramics fulltime. Actor and director Raymond Hawthorne began to collect his work. "At a drunken party I said, 'Oh, I'd like to do some set design'. So Raymond said to come to the [Theatre Corporate's] Hawkes Bay summer school."

He did, loved it, but heard nothing back from the company. Then out of the blue he was rung by Roger McGill.

"He said, 'Do you still want to do something?' I went in and he said, 'It's not going to be easy, here you are.' And it was Cabaret, which was the first one I did. And I knew nothing; nothing about anything. It was a major deep-end experience."

Parker's all-white cat jumps up into his black track-pants lap and then wanders off again, leaving white hairs behind.

"I used to have a black cat, so whatever I wear it's always wrong," he says stroking the hairs away.

Like black and white, set design and pottery seem to be contrasting art forms without much in common.

But Parker says both are about doing away with inessentials.

"I think the thought processes are the same because you're paring away. You're thinking, 'What don't I need? How can I suggest this without it being this?'. You're working in ambience and essence."

On stage, he might depict a railway station with just two people, a suitcase and a train whistle. "It's like, what can you leave out and still be there?"

On the kiln, he says he's removing all the time.

"I've done a lot of coloured stuff and I've just had a [pottery] show at Masterworks where all my work was shiny white. So there was nothing happening except my work was shiny white."

(To emphasise how important drunken parties have been in his life, it was also at one such event that he announced to all and sundry that he was embarking on all-white pottery. "I woke up, realised I'd told everybody, so thought I'd better try it for a month. That was five years ago.")

Parker says the two disciplines complement each other, balancing his working life. One involves fitting into a team, the other is completely private.

Inspiration can cross between the art forms, too. He points again at the bowl of many holes on his table. Light shining through the bowl casts a spotty shadow on the stainless steel.

"The bowls are called gobo bowls. A gobo is a metal stencil that sits in a theatre lamp and it projects a light texture; venetian blinds or palm trees."

What both art forms have done is make him a project worker. He works in chunks of time, from idea through creation to opening; whether that be an exhibition opening or opening night.

"One of the consequences of such a lifestyle, he points out, is that it's a long time between inspiration and payment.

"I don't really associate work with money. I don't. I suppose I get off on working. I like the challenge."

The next one of those is a set for the Tom Stoppard comedy On the Razzle, at Downstage in Wellington. Because it is set in glamorous Vienna just before the First World War, Parker wants his design to suggest the autumn of the empire, with the winter of assassination and war just around the corner.

"So we're doing it all in peeling gold wallpaper and stucco building."

Plans are also under way for a retrospective exhibition of his work at the capital's City Gallery. Alongside pieces representing his 36 years of work will be 36 new pieces, and they have to be ready by January. Then there's the chapter for the accompanying publication that has to explain Parker's glazes, methods and all the "technical stuff".

There's no slowing down.

"I'm totally in love with the next job I'm working on," he says, whatever that may be. And as we exchange best wishes and handshakes, the next job is getting those butter beans in before the rain comes.