MAIA Robin McDonald with her piece entitled Ko Wai Tatou? Picture / Paul Brooks
MAIA Robin McDonald with her piece entitled Ko Wai Tatou? Picture / Paul Brooks
Wellington's Oliver Morse won $10,000 and the Rick Rudd Foundation Emerging Practitioner in Clay Award. His winning entry, House of Dee, and 37 other entries are on display in the Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics' exhibition resulting from the award.
The judges said of
House of Dee
, "This enigmatic award-winningwork could only have been made in the 21st century.
"Oliver brings his experience of painting and the theatre to his ceramics. He is someone who has been working with clay for less than two years yet demonstrates the potential to become a force in the medium."
THE winning entry, House of Dee by Oliver Morse. Picture / Paul Brooks
The award attracted previously unidentified talent from all over the country. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the winner on social media.
The exhibition takes up two ground floor rooms in Quartz and was judged by the trustees of the Rick Rudd Foundation: Tom Seaman, Rick Rudd and Paul Rayner. "There were 65 entries and they could include up to 20 photos of works, one of which they indicated would be the work they would send in if they got selected," says Rick. "From those we selected 37 [now on display]. When they arrived we selected about a dozen that we really liked and then we started to cull them down to a smaller group. Then we went back to the initial submissions and looked at the back-up material, the CVs and everything ... and we ended up with this one [House of Dee]. We took our time and we had some vigorous discussion. "When you're giving away $10,000 you have to do it seriously otherwise you're not being fair to everyone. The idea of this is to change someone's life, but hopefully, everybody else will get a boost from being in the exhibition."
With this award under his belt, Oliver will get noticed whenever he puts work into an exhibition. "Who knows where he'll go, but we'll all be watching him now," says Rick.
The exhibition is eclectic enough to impress almost everybody. An unusual piece, and the first unfired work to be exhibited in Quartz, is Heart Between Our Hands by Keaton Hamilton of Auckland. It is a piece of clay which, when soft, was pressed between the hands of the artist and her father. Rick has acquired it for the collection.
Maia Robin McDonald is one of the artists who entered the award and whose work, Ko Wai Tatou, is on display. "I feel very humbled," she says. "It's like I'm being spoken to by all my contemporaries and it's so moving. I also feel such gratitude to Rick."
The exhibition will run until March 31 next year at Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics, 8 Bates St.
