For the love of ceramics

To mark the final day of Teapot Meditations at Sir Miles Warren Gallery, join us to hear from three ceramics fanatics about what they covet and collect.

In celebration of the consummate ceramic craft conveyed by Chris Weaver’s works in this exhibition, we’ve invited local ceramic artists Cheryl Lucas, Nichola Shanley and Janna van Hasselt for a novel morning of craft kōrero.

Each speaker will deliver a ‘show and tell’ style presentation, sharing insights into their long-standing love of ceramics, their collection, and their thoughts on what makes terrific works so, well, terrific.

Registration is essential for this free event.

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Renowned ceramic artist Cheryl Lucas co-opts the form and structure of natural and built environments into riotous glazed works. Lucas began exhibiting widely in the 1990s, with clay being an adaptive and versatile medium to explore social and environmental issues. She has exhibited internationally and nationally in the decades since, has attended residencies in Sturt, Mittagong, Australia (2013) and at the FuLe International Ceramic Art Centre, Fuping, Shaanxi, China (2007), and has received numerous awards including the Creative New Zealand Craft/Object Fellowship in 2019. A solo exhibition of work by Lucas celebrating her four-decade career, Shaped by Schist and Scoria, was held at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in August 2022. Since the Christchurch earthquakes, she has made many replica architectural ceramics to replace those lost on significant buildings in the city.

Working from her home and studio in Ōhinehou Lyttelton, Nichola Shanley makes work that intends to bring back into the domestic sphere that which is usually reserved for reverence in a glass case. Working across disciplines, Shanley re-forms figurative, grotesque imagery and distinctive, textural mark-making to create works she sites as antidotes to the “spiritually bereft and clinical practices of living in the modern world.” Shanley was born in Waimana and received a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Auckland Society of Art in 1995. Her work has been exhibited nationally since, with recent exhibitions including The Agnes Dei Collection at Two Rooms Gallery (2024) and Living Room at Objectspace in Ōtautahi (2023). Shanley is represented by Brett McDowell Gallery, Ōtepoti Dunedin.

Janna van Hasselt is a printmaker turned ceramicist. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 2004, followed by her Masters at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 as the recipient of a Fulbright Graduate Award. She has undertaken residencies in London, the Netherlands, Belgium and Pennsylvania, and has exhibited throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2021 she presented a solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery titled Chromasill, which was the outcome of receiving the 2020 Zonta Ashburton Female Art Award. Numerous ceramic works by van Hasselt filled the Ngātahi stand at the 2023 Aotearoa Art Fair, and she has recently created immersive installations at The Dowse Art Museum and The Arts House Trust.

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