Potter enjoys experimenting

BY DANIEL SIMMONS RITCHIE - THE WELLINGTONIAN

There's a blue bucket beneath Nicola Dench's workbench where botched works go to die.

She likes to call them failed experiments. She likes the word experiment. It was her years of studying science, she suspects, that now drives her work with clay.

"I guess I'm a little bit of an experimenter at heart. It's trying to make something different to what's out there," she said.

These days, the ceramic artist's experiments are recognised for looking different.

Last September Dench was taken aback when her first entry into the national ceramics exhibition, a bowl entitled Southern Alps, scooped the top award.

"I almost died. This was unbelievable and this was just after joining the New Zealand Potters Association. All these people were going 'who's she?'. I was a little embarrassed actually. I was totally blown away."

It was a busy month for Dench - she won the premier award in between opening her teaching studio in Seatoun and finding out her work would be appearing in Ceramics Today, a reference book to be published worldwide in April.

Dench has been creating art since she was a young girl, when her parents moved from Jersey Island in the English Channel to Christchurch, but ceramics is a new scene for Nicola.

With a degree in microbiology and ecology from Canterbury and a teacher's diploma to boot, working with clay had never been her plan for a full-time vocation.

After settling in Wellington with her family, she took a course in ceramics in 2008 at the Learning Connexion.

Encouraged by an early win in a student pottery competition, Dench realised she had a natural talent for the medium.

"For me it's intuitive, I have got this whole head of stuff - things I see on the beach, things I collect ... it just happens."

Dench said she liked to wander the Seatoun coast near her home for inspiration.

"A lot of my work is about layers of erosion. The whole idea is I try to make it really tactile."

She said ceramics should not just feel and look good; they need to be functional.

"These days everything should have more than one use. I use my bowls for fruit, and the one in my living room is the remote control bowl."

Dench does all her work in a spacious studio detached from her home. She and her husband had it built soon after they drove to Hastings to pick up a kiln they found on Trade Me.

It's a space she spends a lot of time in, whether she's sculpting something for an upcoming exhibition or taking classes in clay sculpting.

While she's optimistic about the future, she's also coy.

"It's hard to say where I will take clay. There are a lot of ways of mixing it with other things," she said.

"I do believe I'm always up to experiment."