Tiles made to order at the Proper Tile Co-op

Press, 23 January 1985, Page 18

Tiles made to order at the Proper Tile Co-op

By

LYN HOLLAND

Two years ago when a group of unemployed people started to make tiles they thought anyone could do it. But they found it was not as easy as they thought. “Now we can make good

tiles, but it took us a year to find out how to do it. We are still learning,” said one of the tilemakers, Susan Sky. She, Paul Jenkins, John Calder, Tiffany Thornley and Kirsten Mitchell are the Proper Tile Co-op, based in

the Warehouse Trust in Lichfield Street. Only she and Paul Jenkins had experience with clay when the group began. The two had the skill to teach other unemployed people pottery. From the beginning the emphasis was

on training each other. At the original Warehouse, in Cashel Street, a broken kiln was available, but there seemed to be many people making pottery, and plenty of other opportunities to learn that skill. They felt there was a

market for domestic tiles and that tile making would be easier to teach and learn.

Now most of them agree that while anyone can learn the technique of producing a flat tile, creating beautiful images on those tiles is an art, requiring the gift of creativity. They bought basic equipment with a $l5OO Internal Affairs grants, but initial Kess was slow. Their reak came when they were given a contract to make 1180 tiles for a 10 metre verandah of the Tamariki School. For the first time their tile making became a full-time activity. That was when the group decided “there’s a job in this for us, there’s a market for this,” said Susan Sky. They have continued to experiment with different methods, learning as they go. Their present kiln was paid for from the profits of sales and the Dunedin clay they use comes from their dole money. They are now hoping to use an Internal Affairs loan to buy equipment which would treble their output to 3200 tiles a day. It is a labour intensive job, using methods from the sixteenth century. Each batch of tiles takes about a month to cut, fire, glaze and dry. There is a current resur-

gence of interest in domestic tiles, because of the amount of money spent on bathrooms in new houses and because of the interest in restoring old houses, according to the co-op members. They feel the market will grow, as it has done overseas, but their present problem is selling their tiles around Christchurch. Part of their expected loan will go towards a booklet to promote their work. They have already visited shops around Christchurch with their tiles and recently held a successful exhibition at Studio 393 in Montreal Street. They now hope to exhibit annually and have been invited to exhibit again at the studio in April. Among those invited to the exhibition were city architects and their next step is to contact them personally.

"The more places we can get our tiles into, the more contracts we will get,” said Susan Sky. The New Zealand market would seem to be wide open for them. All tiles available in this country are commercially made overseas. Apart from the occasional New Zealand potter producing one-off tiles, there is no-one else producing hand-made, creative domestic tiles here. The imported, commere-cially-made tiles are cheaper than the co-op’s

tiles. The tile makers are not interested in competing with those tiles, their handmade ones are different, they say. “I tell people if they can’t see the difference for themselves then they should not buy my tiles,” said Susan Sky.

the difference is that they can offer personalised tiles, hand-made to what the customer wants. All their patterns are original and no two are identical.

“We want people to become involved creatively with our tiles, to turn them around and try different patterns,” said Paul Jenkins. What people cannot do is bring them old tiles and expect these to be recreated. “We are doing our own thing,” Mr Jenkins said.

Eventually the group would like to be self-suffi-cient, working co-opera-tively in a public workshop making tiles without having to rely on the dole. “We are not after big profits, we only want a living wage,” said Tiffany Thornley.

And to be taken seriously — “People don’t take us seriously, they don’t take the quality of our work seriously, because of their image of unemployed people being unskilled. It’s their image that’s wrong, not us,” said Susan Sky.