Canterbury Potters Association

2023 has been a busy year so far for CPA – we marked the club’s 60 th anniversary in April as well as celebrating Margaret Ryley’s long involvement with the club as member, administrator, committee member, active potter and tutor.
Membership numbers have continued to be strong and there are generally waiting lists for our regular term time classes with tutors Jane McCulla, Hugh Rickard, Michael Michaels, Alyse Oliver, Penny de Jong and Kay Zhang.
We’ve run a number of workshops which have been very popular – with Duncan Shearer in January; with four of our tutors showing different techniques of decoration, design and ball making in April; with Kim Henderson leading a monoprinting demonstration and workshop in June; and continuing a series of individual workshops with Alex Prentice exploring throwing techniques for bowls, cylinders, milk jugs and plates. A demonstration of plaster bat and simple mould making is set for October.
There are also periodic raku and gas firings and we’re planning a saggar firing in November.  Coming up we are also planning to unveil a 60 th anniversary commemorative garden featuring Avice Hill lavenders at CPA’s premises in the Avice Hill Reserve at the time of our AGM and annual auction on Sunday 24 September 2023.  We’ll be holding CPA’s 50 th annual exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki (CoCA)
gallery in Christchurch in November with all members invited to contribute pieces.

Hakatere Ceramics

It’s been a busy couple of months for our club.  We had our annual raku day in June and a large number of members turned up to participate.  Lucky with weather held and was sunny, although the air was cold. Each potters applied different glazes on own pieces that were made of different clay body. Some members were happy with outcome, some were not sure and some were disappointed as the pieces had cracked or broken.  The joys of raku.  One of our members (Caz) bought along her own raku kiln so we had 2 kilns going, which meant that there was constant activity.  We can up with a number of improvements for our next raku day, and we are looking forward to our next one.

Our other main focus has been our upcoming exhibition, which runs from the 19^th October-19^th November at the Ashburton Art Gallery.  Members have been busy creating works, and we have also come up with a group project with all members contributing one piece to make up a larger body of work.  We are also hosting a workshop with our guest judge before the exhibition. The exhibition is open 10-4 daily, and we would love to see other groups come for a visit.

Halswell Pottery Group

HPG have had a cheerfully busy year so far – a great exhibition, 4 classes per week, special firings including raku, pit, gas and wood, workshops, demonstrations,  the Gallery being open at the weekends, and Pot Ins Monday during the day as well as (more recently) at night to help newer potters transition to working independently. Our next project will be rebuilding 2 of the outdoor kilns.

Timaru Potters

Seize the Clay exhibition poster –  2023-SCPG-Exhibition-A4