His Own Steam: The Work of Barry Brickell

 Below right - back cover

Following my total rave about this title the other day I am now posting more detailed information taken largely from the book itself.

Potter extraordinaire, conservationist, railway enthusiast and iconoclast Barry Brickell is one of New Zealand’s most important ceramicists. His exuberant and elemental pots and sculptures pulse with a humour and sexuality rare in New Zealand craft or art. One of the leaders of the New Zealand Anglo-Oriental pottery movement that developed from the 1950s, Brickell has shaped both his own characterful domestic ware and ‘erectures’ and the wider pottery culture for more than fifty years. And as his reputation as potter and kiln-master grew, so too did his homegrown narrow-gauge railway at Driving Creek in the Coromandel, which with its sculpted hillsides and human detritus, remains his largest and most powerful work.

In essays by David Craig and Gregory O’Brien and with both newly commissioned photographs by Haru Sameshima and historic images, His Own Steam: The Work of Barry Brickell charts Brickell’s work in the context of his life and times. Texts by David Craig sketch out Brickell’s history and career, then take us through crucial themes, preoccupations and forms in his work, from sustaining domestic ware to the influences of the medieval grotesque and Pacific motifs; from realistic murals to bodily ‘morphs’. Brickell’s ideas about energy and engineering, the body and conservation all collide in his clay work; his well-known ‘spiromorphs’, for example – large-scale spiral creations built from coiled clay – twist and unfold in curves that parallel the spirals of his railway.

The natural and built landscape at Driving Creek has also been crucial for Brickell’s work, as Gregory O’Brien then examines in his tour of Brickell’s fellows, influences and milieu. Artists and craftspeople from Deirdre Airey to Tony Fomison, Nigel Brown to Fatu Feu‘u, Michael Illingworth to Peter Lange all washed up at the Creek; and Brickell’s own journeys took him visiting others, including Yvonne Rust, Toss Woollaston and Ralph Hotere. The book concludes with a comprehensive chronology that further illuminates the ‘animated and vernacular’ achievements – created on his own terms and under his own steam – by this unique New Zealand thinker and craftsman.

DAVID CRAIG, a sociologist and associate professor at University of Otago, has written and researched on society, politics and culture in a wide range of contexts over three decades. Craig is the editor of Barry Brickell: Doggerel (2012), a collection of Brickell’s poems and aphorisms, and co-curator, with Emma Bugden, of the 2013 Barry Brickell retrospective at The Dowse Art Museum.

GREGORY O’BRIEN is a writer, curator and painter whose most recent art projects are the books Hanly (2012), A Micronaut in the Wide World (2011) and Euan Macleod (2010), as well as a catalogue for the touring exhibition Kermadec. In 2012 he was made an Arts Foundation Laureate and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in non-fiction.

HARUHIKO SAMESHIMA is a photographer, artist, image editor, teacher and publisher. His recent publishing projects include Thinking it Through: Tony Watkins (2012) and Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album (2009). He was the principal photographer and image editor for Cone Ten Down: Studio Pottery in New Zealand 1945–1980 (2008) and The Passing World, The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kōwhaiwhai (2010).

His Own Steam: The Work of Barry Brickell also includes a foreword by writer, curator, arts consultant and cultural commentator HAMISH KEITH, a friend of Brickell’s for more than fifty years, and is published in conjunction with His Own Steam: A Barry Brickell Survey, curated by Emma Bugden and David Craig for The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, then touring nationally 2013–2015.

A photo of Barry c.1970's on page 139 of the book -  taken by Marti Friedlander

The book is profusely and gorgeously illustrated with contemporary photographs by  Haruhiko Sameshima and earlier photographs by Gil Hanly, Marti Friedlander, Steve Rumsey, Robin Morrison and others. It is a book of great beauty.