Treasures from the Underworld

‘Treasures from the Underworld’: New Zealand Ceramic Art at Expo ’92 Alison Rutherford

Alison Rutherford

‘Treasures from the Underworld’ remains the largest international exhibition of contemporary New Zealand object art ever mounted. Comprising over 300 individual pieces, in 48 works by 13 potters and ceramicists, and one glass artist, the exhibition formed an integral part of the New Zealand Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, Spain.1 The National Museum of New Zealand curated and commissioned the works, and was the long-term beneficiary of these ceramics, which, upon their return to New Zealand, became part of the national collection. However, although New Zealand ceramic and glass art had achieved an impressive reputation within international ceramic circles, and had a thriving domestic community, recognition for ceramic practice was not forthcoming within the wider New Zealand art world. That ceramic and glass objects where chosen to represent the peak of New Zealand artistic production at this important international event was, therefore, a significant gesture. Yet, despite the unprecedented scale of this exhibition and its international context, the works did not engender the critical analysis that may have led to a re-evaluation of the craft medium within the established hierarchies of New Zealand art.2 Seville’s Expo ’92 followed in the tradition of the large-scale nineteenth-century International Expositions (Expos), or World’s Fairs, that began in 1851 with the ‘Great Exhibition’ in London.3 These Expos, which are held every few years and participated in by several countries, originally provided a platform for the concurrent promotion of the manufactured goods of the confident, industrialised nations of the Western world, as well as the raw materials and labour of the sparsely populated territories of the developing world. As other writers have shown,4 New Zealand was quick to participate in the exhibition movement, despite its comparatively fledgling capitalist economy.5 Today, the national exhibits are expected to cover the areas of raw materials, machinery,

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‘Treasures from the Underworld’: New Zealand Ceramic Art at Expo ’92 Alison Rutherford

manufacturing and fine arts. As scholar Paul Greenhalgh suggests, the fine arts are the ‘counterpoise’ to industry and the sciences, as without them ‘an exhibition [becomes] a trade fair’.6Art displayed in the national pavilions at international exhibitions is therefore usually chosen by the organising committee to both demonstrate pride in the unique culture of the participating nation and to tie in with the overall theme of the exhibition.

Prior to Expo ’92, the National Art Gallery was heavily involved in organising the major exhibition ‘Headlands Thinking through New Zealand Art’ in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.7 The National Art Gallery’s efforts and attention were thus directed elsewhere, fortuitously leaving the door open for an art form other than painting or sculpture to provide the central visual arts focus at Expo ’92. Due to the reputation of the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award, the place of ceramics in New Zealand art was particularly strong at this time, with high international visibility.8 The agreement to commission and mount a major exhibition of New Zealand ceramics was reached between New Zealand Expo ’92, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand and the Board of Trustees of the National Art Gallery, Museum, and War Memorial during 1990, only two years before the exhibition was to take place.9 James Mack, curator and exhibition design consultant of the National Museum of New Zealand, wrote ‘We hope that the exhibition will tell about the passage of humankind upon this earth, Aotearoa, that it will tell about the geological wonder that made it, and that it will also reflect the artistic excellence, bravura and energy of this nation of ours.’10 Visual art from New Zealand was present in a number of formats at Expo ’92. Paintings and sculpture by artists including Toss Woollaston, Pat Hanly, Erenora Puketapu Hetet, Ralph Hotere and Richard Killeen decorated the offices and corporate venues within the New Zealand Pavilion, while an independently organised exhibition of contemporary paintings called ‘Distance Looks Our Way: 10 artists from New Zealand’, was shown for three weeks in the Pavilion of Arts.11 Art works commissioned by contributing commercial participants such as Wools of New Zealand were also on show in the trade displays.12 The physical interior and exterior spaces were dramatic, technically sophisticated environments, involving the input of practitioners including the mixed-media artist Judy Darragh. Finally, there was ‘Treasures from the Underworld’, the specially commissioned ceramics and glass installation. In the words of Ian Fraser, New Zealand Commissioner General to Expo ’92, ‘… an unusual, arresting, challenging display of New Zealand ceramics was a very good way of using an art form to add to all the other propositions that the pavilion was making … branding New Zealand with the mark of excellence’.13 The exhibition, which cost nearly $700,000 to commission and mount,14 required four shipping containers to transport works from New Zealand to Spain. It was installed as a separate but integral part of the New Zealand Pavilion on the mezzanine floor above the trade hall that followed the four ‘theatres of discovery’, and was the final section encountered by visitors to the pavilion.

There was a certain risk involved in all this. Ceramic and glass works were likely to be viewed by visitors to the exhibition as ‘craft’ works and therefore of a lower status than painting or sculpture.

Moreover, rather than being presented as elite works of cultural production, the exhibition pieces were displayed in a narrative installation that was designed to engender an emotional response.

The exclusive display of ceramic art works in this setting ran the risk of making New Zealand seem primitive, anachronistic, and out-of-touch with contemporary trends. The decision to take an exhibition of ceramics to Seville therefore demonstrated just how established this art form had become within New Zealand art and society at this time.15 The organisers believed that the objects chosen were of such distinction that they would convincingly convey messages of innovation and excellence to a European audience.

The curator, James Mack, played a pivotal role in the proposal and subsequent realisation of the Seville exhibition. Mack had demonstrated his commitment to the craft spectrum during his seven years (1981-88) at the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, turning it into New Zealand’s recognised centre for contemporary object art. His passionate and deeply personal involvement in ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ is evident in his vision for the exhibition outlined in his inspirational text, ‘Curator’s Dream of What the Exhibition May Look Like’.16 Mack was committed to the work of New Zealand ceramicists and potters, believing they were ‘saying vital things about our culture in clay; …[they] were speaking in a vital new voice that was born of this land.’17 Mack believed that local artists were without rival in international practice. His letters of confirmation to the selected artists demonstrate his close familiarity with their work, and his belief in each of them individually.18 This intense personal interest provided the necessary drive for all concerned to achieve such a massive undertaking in such a short space of time.

In support of Mack’s vision of a ceramics show for Expo ’92 was the unique history of the site itself. The island of La Cartuja, on which the expo was built, is home to the Monastery de las Cuevas, where Columbus had purportedly planned his great expedition, and where he had originally been buried.19 In 1831 the monastery was sold to an English industrialist and, between the late 1830s and 1983, it was used as a factory for encaustic tiles; the five great brick kilns were still visible on the site. Consequently, the New Zealand exhibition organisers felt that ceramic art would pay homage to this part of the location’s history. Spain’s geographical position as New Zealand’s antipodes similarly contributed to the decision to take ceramic works to Seville. The layers of soil, and the great internal forces of magma and fire that lie between the two countries seemed to reference both the materials and processes of ceramic production itself.

The artists selected comprised some of New Zealand’s best known makers and were, almost without exception, established practitioners at the height of their profession.20 That the selection was weighted heavily towards well-established potters is not surprising; the time frame was very tight and Mack needed to be able to rely upon the participants achieving large scale, significant work, on time. Even so, the results far outweighed his expectations. Mack wrote that the artists ‘moved a million miles’ with the original concept, each of them creating works of a physical and conceptual dimension that greatly enhanced the original remit.21 Their work displayed an eclectic, quirky mixture of styles, and the selective eye of the curator was immediately apparent.

Mack had briefed all of the artists individually, giving each one a phrase or suggestion to work with. He requested that each artist should produce work in his or her established style, but to an unprecedented size. His letters of confirmation to each exhibitor show his enthusiastic

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‘Treasures from the Underworld’: New Zealand Ceramic Art at Expo ’92 Alison Rutherford

commitment to the overall exhibition concept, but also reveal the flexibility of this brief. He trusted each participant to produce work corresponding to his concept, and was confident that he would be able to achieve his grand design from the resulting objects. Every artist seems to have taken up Mack’s challenge. For many it required considerable investment in new equipment in order to carry out the commission, for some it also required an investment in building personal strength and protecting physical resources.22 The financial commissions were generous and indicate the professional nature of the contract. Most participants received $15,000 each, with Steve Fullmer, Richard Parker and Ann Verdcourt receiving $30,000 for their larger concepts. The size of the commission allowed the potters (who would usually earn approx $20,000 p.a. at this date) to invest in the required materials and equipment and to devote their full attention to the project, which in no small way contributed to the successful realisation of Mack’s vision.

From the first, Mack had seen the ceramics exhibition as an orchestrated experience, a statement not only about the country but significantly of the country. He is repeatedly on record as stating that it was in clay that New Zealand artists were expressing something unique in their work.

The whole mezzanine installation can be seen as a metaphor for the ‘New World’ of southern hemisphere New Zealand – a kind of geological/geographical theme park expressed in clay.

Three main themes and a number of associated secondary motifs can be discerned in the installation. The most obvious thread is that of geological and botanical forms. Mack asked Len Castle to produce ‘seven bowls … starting from one end with one of those staggering red going blue, going oxidised glazes of yours coming down to a cooler more languid blue, oozing natural life’.23 Castle’s response was to produce bowls with deep, powerful glazes and rugged exteriors, which not only conjure the fiery nature of volcanic New Zealand but also the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. Christine Boswijk was given the phrase ‘verdant thrust’24 as a key element in her brief, and drew on her existing work with nikau and native forests. She created a set of three large stoneware vessels representing the base of nikau heads, and a forest of small trees to be encased in a one metre square case.

Barry Brickell, the only artist to have made a detailed study of terracotta, was asked to reflect and honour the Pacific Lapita pottery tradition.25 Brickell interpreted the Pacific reference very broadly, however. In the Spanish brochure, which used one of his works as the background image on the front cover, he commented that ‘pacific means calm’, and made reference to Gauguin’s Pacific work.26 Another thread was that of discovery and navigation, and it was here that Mack placed the work of Pareau Corneal to represent the Polynesian voyagers. Ann Verdcourt, whose work is figurative and often humorous, was asked to make a southern hemisphere response to the Christopher Columbus story which she replicated in clay, similar in style and presentation to fifteenth century woodcuts.27 A fabulously wry extravaganza involving some 70 odd characters, its narrative immediacy resonated with the Expo visitors, a large percentage of whom were local Spaniards.

Chester Nealie’s installation included his whole kiln, which had enthralled Mack when he had visited Nealie during the making process.28 The inclusion of the kiln is very appropriate for New Zealand potters, whose history in the early twentieth century was intimately connected with learning to build kilns from scratch. Being an anagma wood-fired kiln it referred to the Japanese tradition that has so greatly influenced New Zealand ceramic production, and is very different to the highly industrialised processes of the Spanish tradition. Those processes were reflected in the work of Richard Parker, who produced brightly coloured tiles as well as several gigantic highly glazed forms, in homage to the ceramic history of the Expo site.

Ann Robinson, the glass artist who, of all the New Zealand participants, had the greatest international recognition, was asked to think ‘southern hemisphere’ and to make bowls of the iridescent Pacific blue that she was noted for. She states that the scale of the commission seemed to call for ‘ceremonial … works of ritual power’.29 Her two magnificent cast glass nikau stood in welcome at the exhibition entrance. Regrettably, her comment about the depth of meaning in the use of nikau (nikau being the New Zealand palm, and palm trees having associations with welcome/hosanna and peace), is found buried in an interview in the very specialist low circulation magazine Potter, and was not widely appreciated.30 She also created a range of vessels, some with albatross heads.

These ‘bird bowls’ are not totally convincing however, the head appearing as a mere afterthought, although they do introduce into ceramics that great wanderer of the southern ocean – the albatross.

Paerau Corneal, In the beginning were the Waka, 1991, ceramic, muka, maire, totara.

Courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

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‘Treasures from the Underworld’: New Zealand Ceramic Art at Expo ’92 Alison Rutherford

The abiding impression of the exhibition was of the sheer physicality of the work. The scale was enormous, the works predominantly monumental and heavy, and even when individual elements were lighter, as in the work of Boswijck and Christine Hellyar, repetitive elements contributed to a perception of scale. The works of Castle and Brickell (the two oldest potters in the show) strongly referred to the British and Japanese vernacular traditions that had been the foundation of New Zealand ceramics. Many of the other works, particularly those with a strong interest in surface (for example the work of Darryl Robertson), demonstrated additional strands in contemporary New Zealand ceramics. The techniques used included stoneware, terracotta, and earthenware, with firing techniques ranging from electricity to dung-fired raku and a wide variety of glazing.

Overall the works provided a significant contrast to work being produced elsewhere in the world at this time, such as the conceptually challenging postmodern investigations of form and surface

by British potter Alison Brittan. In this respect they demonstrated Mack’s claim that New Zealand pottery and ceramics was unique, that it was ‘speaking in a vital new voice that was born of this land.’31 Timothy Luke, who has researched the large international festivals that occurred in the United States in the 1980s, proposes that we ‘need to read the aesthetic text of an art exhibition in terms of political context’,32 and suggests that political motivations such as ‘aesthetic legitimation; disciplined disinformation; ideological containment; [and] mythological manipulation’ are likely to be present. While a sense of ‘aesthetic legitimation’ was certainly present elsewhere in the New Zealand Pavilion at Expo ’92, for example in the commercial use of artists as carpet designers by Wools of New Zealand, and the use of New Zealand artworks to decorate the corporate offices and lounge, the primary conceptual driver behind the ceramics installation itself could be described as ‘mythological manipulation’. Ceramic works, which are, of course, products made from the very substance of the earth, make a nation present in a way that a painting or a photograph can never achieve. As art historian Robert Nelson states, ‘It is a basic requirement of a nation that it have a territory, whether real or imagined.’33 In this sense, ceramic objects make the nation – which has previously been only an ‘artificial and ephemeral’ construct – ‘appear natural and permanent’ to the exhibition visitors.34 ‘Mythological manipulation’ was also present at a linguistic level in the exhibition literature.

The word ‘treasures’ carries associations of legendary objects, usually precious metals and gems, and frequently of historical as well as monetary value.35 Yet in this instance the meanings were metaphorical. The objects referred to were newly created from ‘base’ materials, and the ‘treasures’ they were meant to convey were the rare values of New Zealand – an uncrowded environment, vibrant natural resources and the ability of New Zealand people to create value and meaning from the natural world. Moreover, to title the works ‘treasures’ is to insist on their status as elite art works.

Of vital importance to visitor reception, and therefore the overall success of an exhibition, is the accompanying interpretive material. In this respect ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ appears to have been sadly lacking. Photographic records of the installation – of which there appear to be very few – do not show any wall panels or similar labels, and a small Spanish language brochure

was only hurriedly arranged after the visit of the Chair and Executive Director of the Arts Council in May 1992.36 Lacking material to contextualise the works or explain the narrative of the installation to the viewer, the works were simply left to speak for themselves.

The photographer/writer Louise Guerin was commissioned by the organising committee to provide copy and photographs for news and promotional material. The Spanish brochure, the studio images of individual works used in the catalogue for the New Zealand tour, and a substantial number of press articles ensued, and this material gives a good understanding of the event from a popular point of view. No contemporary critical aesthetic analysis of the event seems to have taken place however, and it is here that we can most clearly see the inferior position of craft within the institutional framework of New Zealand art. Such major exhibitions as ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ frequently inspire academic investigation and debate: for example, the ‘Te Maori’ (1984) exhibition, prompted a total re-evaluation of taonga Maori as art within New Zealand. The same year that ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ appeared in Seville, ‘Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art’ appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

‘Headlands’, with its accompanying catalogue of critical essays, was the catalyst for significant debate within the New Zealand art world, particularly on issues of appropriation and the place of Maori imagery in contemporary New Zealand art. This debate was the primary focus for discussions of contemporary art practice in New Zealand for several years, and completely overshadowed any other issues, such as the place of craft media and processes within fine arts practice, which could have been inspired by critical analysis of ‘Treasures from the Underworld’.

By the time the Expo ceramics toured New Zealand in 1993-5, the ‘Headlands’ arguments had captured intellectual interest and academic debate. As a result, New Zealand craft missed currents of research and theory that were being developed in the UK and Australia by art historians and theorists such as Tanya Harrod and Sue Rowley.37 Written critical analysis also plays a vital role in the perceived prestige of an artform. ‘Distance Looks Our Way’ and ‘Headlands’ are frequently alluded to as ‘landmark’ exhibitions in the history of New Zealand art. This appreciation reinforces the perception of the art forms involved – predominantly painting – as being of higher status. Although ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ remains the most significant exhibition of New Zealand ceramic art ever mounted, the lack of interpretation and critical analysis accompanying the exhibition denied the work – and the artists involved – a corresponding acknowledgement. The lack of contemporary analytical material continues to affect the position of ceramics in the art/craft debate in this country. Whereas the catalogues accompanying ‘Headlands’ and ‘Distance Looks Our Way’ remain a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of visual culture, the scarcity of similar resources from ‘Treasures from the Underworld’ hinders our understanding of this particular aspect of New Zealand’s cultural production.

Within New Zealand’s specialist art media, one of the institutional gatekeepers of power and prestige in the local art world, craft art was largely disregarded. Contemporary articles in Art New Zealand, for example, considered New Zealand art almost exclusively in terms of painting, with a little sculpture and printmaking alongside, as has almost every New Zealand history of art written since the 1960s. Only the first Fletcher Brownbuilt Award was covered at all by Art New Zealand

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‘Treasures from the Underworld’: New Zealand Ceramic Art at Expo ’92 Alison Rutherford

and even the New Zealand tour of ‘Treasures from the Underworld’38 did not rate a mention. The arts media therefore privileged the ‘fine’ art that spoke of Western art traditions over the ‘craft’ that spoke directly of local conditions. The different treatment of these two areas of cultural production both exemplifies and further entrenches the art/craft divide.

As an art form, ceramics promoted the leading edge, high quality, internationally recognised values New Zealand Expo ’92 was attempting to express in Seville. Individual New Zealand potters were highly regarded internationally, and New Zealand had a high visibility in the international ceramics world brought about by the success of the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award. It was uniquely suited to the location, and had a strong champion in the form of the curator James Mack, with enthusiastic support from the New Zealand Commissioner to Expo ’92, Ian Fraser.

The resulting commissioned works vindicated the choice of medium, being independently magnificent demonstrations of the conceptual strength and physical virtuosity of the artists, while still providing the curator with the material to create his ‘dream’ installation. Yet, although this medium was able to move from the margins to the mainstream for a short period in order to represent the nation’s artistic production at this one event, this shift in status could not be maintained. Without the support of the arts media or academia, Treasures from the Underworld did not lead to a reassessment of hierarchies within New Zealand fine arts practice. Without the credibility afforded by recognition from acknowledged arts institutions, the exhibition and the works within it remained bound by the lower status accorded to craft objects once they were no longer objects of cultural diplomacy. Expo ’92 was an exceptional opportunity for a craft medium to be accorded the same consideration as a ‘fine’ art, and thereby gain equality within the art world.

In the final analysis, however, despite the successful realisation of Mack’s ‘dream’, this magnificent and important exhibition of object art was not accorded the critical evaluation it deserved.

Such neglect of an aspect of artistic production only limits our greater understanding of the full spectrum of the arts.

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The artists were: Christine Boswijk, Barry Brickell, Len Castle, Paerau Corneal, Steve Fulmer, Brian Gartside, Julia van Helden, Christine Hellyar, Chester Neallie, Richard Parker, Darryl Robertson, Ann Robinson; Robyn Stewart and Ann Verdcourt.

See the essays included in ed. Peter Dormer, The Culture of Craft (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), and the ‘Foreword’ and ‘Introduction’ in Helen Schamroth, 100 New Zealand Craft Artists (Auckland, 1998). These and other titles discuss the neglect of craft by arts institutions as the major cause of the continuing art/craft dichotomy, arguing that craft objects cannot necessarily be differentiated from fine arts objects.

There had been previous industrial fairs held in France, but the 1851 Great Exhibition is the first on a truly international scale.

See for example Rebecca Rice, Picturing Progress in Paradise, unpublished MA thesis (Wellington: Victoria University, 2003), and Ewan Johnstone, Representing the Pacific at International Exhibitions 1851-1940, unpublished PhD thesis (Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1999). For international exhibitions held in New Zealand see Jock Phillips, ‘Exhibiting Ourselves: the Exhibition and National Identity’ in ed. John Mansfield Thomson, Farewell to Colonialism: the New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch 1906-07 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1998), 17-26.

New Zealand was formally established as a British colony in 1840.

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 198.

In her catalogue essay ‘Figuring Culture’, Bernice Murphy claims that ‘Headlands … explor[ed] the territory of post-War

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New Zealand Art’, which indicates the comprehensive scope of the endeavour. Bernice Murphy, ‘Figuring Culture’ in ed.

Mary Barr, Headlands Thinking Through New Zealand Art (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 11.

The Fletcher Challenge Award (originally the Fletcher Brownbuilt Pottery Award) began in 1977. The fundamental idea behind the award was to lift pottery above the Cinderella status, which at that time it held in comparison with the other arts.

See www.fletchercollection.co.nz/ceramics.php The terms set out in the Heads of Agreement were that ‘The primary purpose of this exhibition will be to provide an international platform for New Zealand ceramic artists through an exhibition that expresses New Zealand’s individual character, and is related to the Expo theme, ‘The Age of Discovery’ (Creative New Zealand; 14359:15461.)

James Mack, Letter to participants, 29 October 1990 (Creative New Zealand; 14349:15461) This space was available to participating nations on a rotating short-term basis. See ed. Mary Barr, Distance Looks our Way: 10 Artists from New Zealand (Wellington: Distance Looks Our Way Trust, 1992).

For example, Wools of New Zealand contracted Dilana Rugs and three of the artists who designed for them (Michael Reed, Bing Dawe and Kate Wells) to produce artists’ carpets for their Expo display. This demonstrates that companies recognized that aesthetic presentation would add commercial value to their exhibits.

Ian Fraser quoted in Peter Gibbs, ‘The State of Clay’, Craft New Zealand (Spring 1991): 4.

The original budget agreed by the three parties was $535,000. This blew out to $690,000, caused mainly by the unforeseen size of the items, which required more shipping and larger display cases than budgeted for. See correspondence from Ian Fraser to Peter Quin (Arts Council) and Alan Baker (MONZ), 14 January 1992 (Creative New Zealand; 14349:15461).

Individual New Zealand potters, and the nation as a whole, had a high reputation within international ceramic circles, due in no small part to the prestigious Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award.

James Mack, ‘Curator’s Dream of What the Exhibition May Look Like’, 20 October 1990 (Creative New Zealand 14349:15461).

Mack, Treasures, 4.

For example, he wrote to Brian Gartside ‘… I have no hesitation that you will do it sublimely. I hope that we might be able to get some of your lovely old acid colours and enamels.’ James Mack to Brian Gartside; n.d. (Creative New Zealand; 14349:15461).

Jill Malcom, ‘The Heart of Spain’, Pacific Way, Issue 49 (March 1992): 48.

The exception was Pareau Corneal, a recent graduate of Whitireia Community College’s Diploma in Craft. The only Maori maker, at 31 she was also the youngest.

Pauline Swain, ‘Ceramics excellence for expo’, The Dominion, 29 August 1991, 9.

Ann Verdcourt bought a new kiln ‘especially for this job’ (Mack, Treasures, 39), and Darryl Robertson had to bandage his hands to protect his skin when throwing such large amounts of highly textured clay. See Louise Guerin, Expo ceramics impress, Press, 15 July 1992, 20.

James Mack; n.d. (Creative New Zealand; 14349:15461).

Ibid.

New Zealand is without an indigenous tradition in ceramics. The clay technology taken by the Lapita peoples from the regions of New Guinea into the Pacific as far as Samoa and Tonga had not persisted in the islands of Polynesia, and was not developed independently by the Maori before the settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand by Europeans.

Treasures from the Underworld Tesoros del Misterioso Mundo Antipoda, Wellington, 1992 (Creative New Zealand; 14349:15461).

Mack had seen her recent ‘Velasquez Girls’ figurines.

Chester Nealie, now resident in Australia, is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of wood-firing in the world.

Robinson, Treasures, 35.

Potter,Vol. 34: 3(1992): 15.

Mack, Treasures, 4.

Timothy Luke, Shows of Force. Power, Politics and Ideology in Art Exhibitions, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 231.

Robert S. Nelson, ‘Appropriation’ in eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),124.

Ibid.

The treasure, in fact, that the Spanish took from the Americas.

Council Paper QE92/2; Report of Council Chair & Executive Director on their visit to Seville, 5 June 1992 (Creative New Zealand; 434.6). Point 7 states: ‘A major drawback of the current [ceramics] exhibition is the lack of documentation. No printed material of any kind is available to visitors to the exhibition at present. Steps are being taken now following our visit to produce a brochure in Spanish and English which provides basic information about the artists and the exhibition.’

For example, Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in Britian in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), and Sue Rowley, Craft & Contemporary Theory (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997).

Renamed Treasures of the Underworld for the New Zealand tour.

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