Ivory and clay

Press, 15 June 1983, Page 14

Ivory and clay

Reducing 370 assorted pots and pottery items to only 200 pieces to fit into the exhibition space allotted is no easy task.

Owen Mapp and Anneke Borren will vouch for that. The Wellington bone carver and ceramist spent most of Friday selecting items for inclusion in the Canterbury Potters’ Association twentieth anniversary exhibition, which opens tomorrow.

The Wellington couple are guest exhibitors at the exhibition and were asked to choose the pieces made by members of the association for the exhibition.

“It is important to try and understand the person behind the piece when you look at it,” said Anneke Borren.

“So many things should be considered, like the conditions under which they are working, and what they are trying to say.”

This is why Miss Borren, originally from the Netherlands, and her husband insist on setting up their own exhibitions. That way, they say, they have control of the whole sequence of making the piece and exhibiting it in the right context. Miss Borren has brought 25 pieces of her work to Christchurch. They include two large tea sets in a traditional style and several pots.

She describes herself as a “glaze potter” not a “clay potter”. The glaze is very important, she explains. “My work is done in overglaze. The pot is fired and I

paint on the pattern or design using different oxides which crystalise. That way the pattern is a part of. the glaze. The pots are not fired again.”

Each oxide reacts to give a different colour. The tea sets feature patterns in the different colours. A black is achieved by combining the four different oxides.

The ceramist is particularly fond of working with the black “because it is alive enough by itself, but also very subtle. In some lights the decoration can hardly be seen, in other lights it strikes you in the face.”

Owen Mapp carves in beef bone, whale bone, whale ivory, elephant ivory — “if it is bone and found in this country I’ll carve it,” he says. While it is legal to use whale bone for carving in this country it is illegal to import it.

Mr Mapp acquires most of his material for carving by swapping or shrewd purchases at garage or antique sales. “Sometimes people send me ivory because they know I carve it,” he says. “They find pieces and do not want them, or only part of them.” He cites the example of a carving done in elephant tusk ivory, which had been in New Zealand for 100 years before he acquired it.

He carves in three different styles: a realistic style, similar to Japanese carving, and a contemporary and traditional New Zealand style, influenced by Maori motifs.

His carvings range from

a ring and pendant neck hanging he wears to a carved whale made for a television programme to an unfinished hei tiki for a book on New Zealand, to a flute made from a human leg bone, inlaid with elephant ivory and bone.

The work is almost completely hand done using two small bulb-handled chisels. “The preliminary roughing out I don’t do by hand , but the rest is all hand done. To polish the carvings I use sandpaper, baby powder and baby oil,” he explains. .Mr Mapp sees his pieces as three dimensional. Even the reverse sides of neck pendants and the inside of his ring are carved in a continuation of the motif on the “right” side. “To not carve the whole piece is to cheat,” he says. His carvings are meant to be handled, to be picked up and fondled, not just looked at.

Asked how long a particu-

lar item took to carve he says, “three days and 10 years experience. What took me that time to do 10 years ago now only takes a day. It is the experience and knowing the material that counts.”

Mr Mapp will be showing 30 pieces of carving. The other guest exhibitor at the show, Cecilia Parkinson, will show 21 pots. The exhibition at the C.S.A. Gallery will run until June 26.

It marks the twentieth anniversary of the Potters Association. Christchurch formed its own potters group in 1963 after the New Zealand Society of Potters held its national exhibition in the city in 1961. The association’s founder, Mrs Wyn Reed, recalls that in the 1960 s potters collected their own clay from Banks Peninsula, Ellesmere and Glentunnel and had to experiment with glazes, as there were very few recipes available.