Anagama Archaeology

'It's a very sensuous process, working with clay. It's soft, it's malleable, it's seductive, it's a love process, and it leaves fabulous marks. It's exciting, but it's quiet and it can leave a fluidity that gives you a feeling of movement - even though it has stopped, it leaves the movement. It leaves the movement of the emotion that's in you all the time.'

'The vessels were either thrown, coiled and thrown. After they came off the wheel and while they were still soft, they were again worked on and altered to give them the fluidity and sensuousness of clay in motion. The forms are a distillation of influences from Pacific Rim artefact, especially patu and pounders.

Several months of vessel making was packed unglazed into a stepped woodfired tunnel kiln. The posts were carefully arranged so that the fire and the ash of the wood fuel would produce rich-coloured natural ash glazes. The firing process over five days was an orchestrated combustion dance - ten tonnes of pine offcuts were consumed to temperatures of 1300 degrees celsius sustained for 70 hours. Speciality woods like pohutukawa and mangrove were side stoked on to specific pots to create unique colours and effects. The pots were cooled for five days.

The works was all made and fired in Australia while I was Artist-in-Residence at Monash University, Gippsland, Victoria.'

Chester Nealie

Wellington, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Treasures of the Underworld Exhibition, 1992; Seville, Spain, national touring exhibition 1993. cat. no 23, p29 , ill.