Peter Gibbs has recrafted his pottery passion three decades after he stepped away from the wheel and kiln.
The retired sub-editor says his pottery work began in the “great crafting revolution” in the 70s and, after he left his teaching role in Auckland, he made it his full-time work, establishing a workshop in Onekaka in 1975.
He opened Omaio Pottery in 1979, after moving to Waimea West, and was a founding committee member of the Nelson Potters Association, which was established the same year.
Peter says, he wrote its newsletter while also writing articles for global pottery magazines, and in 1990 he became the Craft NZ magazine editor.
After selling his pottery workshop three years later, he moved into the role of sub-editor at the Nelson Evening Mail in 1994, where he remained until his retirement in 2015.
Peter says, being asked to write a pottery history piece for Nelson Clay Week last year re-sparked his passion and, after discussing the idea with friends, they donated him a wheel and kiln, and he established a pottery space in his inner-city home’s garage.
When he noticed how many teapots, bowls, and vases he’d made, he thought he should consider selling a few, which he later did at Wall to Wall Art in October.
“I like to show the marks of where my fingers went, and if it’s got a handle on or something I like to see the marks of how that was attached, and I like to have glazes that enhance those processes,” he says.
“For the first time in my life, I’m working with a lot more colour than I used to, and the response is really good.
“My wife [Cathie] has built a website, and she’s taking care of photographs, and social media, and we’re getting lots of requests from all over the country.”
Peter says he’s crafted more than 100 pottery creations in the past five weeks for his exhibition at the Refinery ArtSpace, which opened on Monday.
“Maybe 20 per cent of them will go in, so it will be a fairly dense exhibition, in the sense that there will be quite a lot of work.
“I just want to announce to the world that, ‘hey, I haven’t been doing anything for 30 years, but now I’m back’… because there isn’t much point in a creative endeavour if nobody knows.
“This is the perfect time of year with the lead up to Christmas and the influx of tourists, holidays, and summer visitors, because the exhibition goes on to mid-January, so we’ll capture a lot of that post-Christmas visitors from out of town.”
Peter says he will host a floor talk at the gallery on 8 December at 5:30pm.
