Potted history

By JANET HUNT

The kitchen table in an unpretentious house above Waiheke's Putiki Bay is loaded with plate, bowl, mug, vase, goblet, jar, bottle, teapot, teacup - many shapes, sizes, colours and glazes.

Hand-formed, fluted, multifaceted, plain - the selection of 26 pieces which represents the first 12 years of sculptor Denis O'Connor's working life has been acquired by the Auckland War Memorial Museum. It is a major purchase, significant in terms of the museum's now substantially increased collection of O'Connor's work and as a point of closure for the artist himself.

Few artists have this sort of opportunity, O'Connor explains. The task of retrospection and assessment most commonly falls to someone else, often at a much later stage of the artist's career. He has been able to do it himself for the most prosaic of reasons: he bought his Waiheke home in 1970 and it has been his base since. Consequently, he has retained many pieces - some because they were the best of show, and some because they have been stored and forgotten these past 20 or 30 years. Had he moved house, many of them would have been lost or dispersed long since.

The process of rediscovering, cataloguing and negotiating began a year ago. O'Connor needed to make space for new work, to clear the debris. Some of the pieces went to private owners, but O'Connor also wanted representation in public collections. The Dowse Art Museum holds about 30 O'Connor works and he knew the Auckland Museum had a small collection.

"I wanted to fill it out so they had a representative work from each of those years I was working in clay, so that together they would have enough stock to be able to put together a survey," he says.

The museum welcomed his approach. Director Rodney Wilson and Louis LeVaillant, curator of applied arts, saw it as a unique opportunity. O'Connor, LeVaillant explains, was part of the Auckland-based "five-by-five" group of ceramic artists, with Warren Tippett, Bronwyn Cornish, John Parker and Peter Hawkesby. "The group really changed the direction of ceramics practice and was hugely talked about ... They came in with a range of other philosophies and working processes."

It can be difficult to acquire sufficient works to represent a period well, so the offer of O'Connor's private reference collection was "brilliant".

It was a significant event for O'Connor as well. The sale and the associated sorting and reviewing provided closure to his first and formative period. He found himself revisiting not only the work but also his extensive notebooks and travel diaries he kept at that time.

To his delight, O'Connor recognises a method and discipline in the younger artist which has been confirmed and strengthened by time. "It's almost been like uncovering an old snap-book of your parents when they were children and trying to identify characteristics in the faces and mannerisms and poses ... that process [was] working quite effectively way back then, 30 years ago. I think you're more conscious of it when you're older, but it was alive and well and kicking and doing its thing at the very beginning."

The very beginning was his years at the Wellington School of Industrial Design, where O'Connor revelled in the combination of applied and fine arts. He married and left early, and in 1970 set up the kilns on Waiheke and taught himself the business of ceramics.

"It wasn't a calling which came easily. Initially I felt I didn't have the wherewithal to be a potter - I wasn't your No 8 wire practical man - I really had to cobble together the skills."

Despite - or perhaps because of - that limitation, he set about becoming an expert not only in the technical side of clay work but also in the history and tradition of ceramic arts. He picked the brains of New Zealand's finest potters and travelled to the United States and Japan to learn from masters of traditional and avant-garde ceramic art. He dug clay, made a wheel and built his own kilns, using bricks pirated from dilapidated brickworks around the city.

"They were very, very primitive ... but as a result of that, the pots that came out of them had extraordinary qualities, and it was to do with the kiln's inefficiency as machines. They took days to fire. Neighbours would complain about being blanketed for days on end in black, sooty smoke, the fire brigade would turn up almost on cue at three in the morning when I was salt-glazing and someone living on the headland opposite would have reported a 4m-high flame off the top of a pohutukawa."

O'Connor began with platters, cups and pots and at the beginning would have been described as a "studio potter", but he was even then combining the potter's discipline with that of the fine artist, moving from the functional towards the experimental.

"Even though I continued to make containers over the last three to four years I was involved with clay, they were more to fill out the kiln. What I was bringing to those vessels and containers was a very, very experimental approach, and I was scribing text on them, drawing from sources like pop music lyrics and other low-art traditions and treating the surfaces of those works much as contemporary painters gather up their subject matter from all different sources now."

O'Connor's involvement with clay ended in 1984 with his exhibition Songs of the Gulf at Auckland Art Gallery. On the strength of that, he became the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at Otago University and, while there, began to sculpt in other materials.

"Songs of the Gulf represented my relationship with this part of New Zealand, exploring its social history, poetic climate and what constituted its distinctive characteristics as a coastal locale. That the pieces were made from porcelain and locally dug clay made that body of work all the more left of centre and unprecedented."

The museum's acquisition of the pieces means a lot to O'Connor: space in the workshop and funding for new work for a start, but more important than either is his participation through his work in the evaluation of the place of ceramic art in New Zealand culture, about value and definition.

"There has always been an appalling lack of scholarship to do with the clay tradition and as a result of that, it has often been belittled by the practitioners of the fine arts ... painting and sculpture have been perceived as more important disciplines."

The works will be exhibited at some point and might initiate scholarship and more informed debate, something O'Connor considers long overdue.