Yellow Stack finds a home at Quartz

PORTAGE WINNER: Rick Rudd and Andrea du Chatenier with Yellow Stack. PICTURE / PAUL BROOKS

UCOL School of Fine Arts tutor and former artist-in-residence at Tylee Cottage, Andrea du Chatenier, was awarded the Guldagergaard Residency in the Portage Ceramic Awards — New Zealand's premier awards for the ceramic arts held and judged in Auckland late last year. The award was for her piece Yellow Stack.
That piece has now found a permanent home at Rick Rudd's Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics in Bates St.

"It's really an exploration of materials and what they do," says Andrea of Yellow Stack. "Porcelain is a beautiful, white material so it's easy to give it these fantastic, vibrant colours."
"Porcelain high fired is translucent when thin, but even when it's thicker it has a density that no other clay has," Rick says.
"It vitrifies, goes like glass, very, very hard," says Andrea. "That's one of its fantastic properties. Its whiteness is another. So even though it's quite vulnerable, it's still tough. One of the other things in ceramics is this basic idea of 'joining'. When you learn ceramics, the number one thing you learn is how to join one piece of clay to another. It's really the identification between a 'master' and a 'non-master' — seamless joins."

In Yellow Stack, the components are not joined as such, but sealed together by the rich, yellow glaze.
"The tradition of ceramics is things beautifully joined — the glaze is like an after effect that's put on the surface, but here the glaze does something else, it's actually the structural integrity of this piece," says Andrea. "I made the individual pieces, I then coloured them, I put them together in a stack, bisque fired them and then stuck them together with the glaze."

And now it's back in Whanganui.
"It went to the Portage," says Rick. "And it was selected as the winner of the Residency Award." Andrea brought back a catalogue for Rick to look at, he saw Yellow Stack and thought it looked fabulous. "It's an award winner, it was made in Whanganui, I've got a collection upstairs called Made in Whanganui, I thought it should come back, so I bought it for the collection here. It seemed the right thing to do. It has returned after being on show in Auckland for three months."
"It is a wonderful surprise and a great home for it," says Andrea.
"Plus, I want to eat it! It looks like sugar," Rick says.
Yellow Stack does have a dessert quality about it, making it look extremely edible.
"The colour too, for me," says Andrea, "Its very synaesthetic, that crossover from eye to taste — you taste a colour, rather than just see it.
"The thing about clay, about ceramics is transformation. You're putting it in the kiln and it totally transforms in some way. It's primordial, the wonders of fire."

Guldagergaard is the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark, and that is where Andrea will spend five weeks in September.
"The thing about the residency, I think, is Andrea is the right one to get it," says Rick. "What she does there is going to spin off into her tutoring at UCOL. It's going to go further ... it's a personal development period."
"I am new at clay, but my ideas in terms of what I do with clay are probably more sculptural," says Andrea. She did a craft design course years ago and part of that was ceramics, then studied sculpture before coming to Whanganui and taking up clay again.
"She has made this enormous leap from starting again to really taking it somewhere, and somewhere where most people working in New Zealand have not taken it. So this residency is the right time to give her the chance to experiment, work and give her another leap," says Rick.
Andrea is looking forward to spending time at Guldagergaard.
"What they have there are all the things that you can dream of in terms of equipment. You have technicians there to help you, you have studio space to work in, you have other people who are experts in the field that you can learn from ... and a lot of top international ceramicists are either there or passing through, doing workshops or things like that.
"I have to make sure that I've planned a body of work to do, and I'll be doing some of that before I go, making sure I have a research proposal that I'm investigating while I'm there."
"With only five weeks there you really have to hit the ground running to get anything out of it," says Rick.

Andrea will have to accustom herself to different kilns and the way they operate, as well as different kinds of clay.
"They have things like black porcelain available that is from Denmark," she says. "It's stained in the ground and you get this matte black clay. It's very sexy."

UCOL has a ceramic elective again, reintroduced after about 15 years, and Andrea managed to get a kiln brought in and operating in the Art and Design School.
"We've got a burgeoning ceramic emphasis … people can study ceramics."
But Andrea doesn't just work in clay.
"At the moment all my studio time is doing ceramics, but I have used a lot of different materials and it's that search for material properties, as I'm using them, that's important. When I stumbled on clay again, it's really so engaging in terms of its difficulties, the problems … it's challenging. It's simple, so you get primary school kids using it. Basic clay stuff is easy, but there are so many technical, aesthetic, formal points of interest in it, that once you start getting into it there are so many questions and so many possibilities that there's an obsession, an addictive thing happens."
"To some extent it's out of your control," adds Rick. "As much as you want to be a control freak, there is that percentage that is always just out of control. With clay, the fire has the final say, the kiln has the last word."
The term 'kissed by the fire' has been used to describe pieces that have come out of the kiln not as the creator intended. 'Broken' is an alternative term.

Andrea says glazing and the tricky problems of achieving the desired colours mean practice is essential.
"There are so many variables, it is so unexacting that it is a very personal endeavour," she says. "It's an alchemy."

Yellow Stack was part of that process, won her an experience at the prestigious Guldagergaard Centre and is now part of the amazing collection at Quartz.