Volume 6, Issue 1 of Ceramics NZ Magazine gives space to the messy joy of collaboration, the bonds forged through wood-firing, and the social power of community events. We dive into the chaos of Brickell-Brac at Whangārei Art Museum, visit Nelson Clay Week 2022, explore the cross-cultural knowledge-sharing of anagama firing. We peek behind the scenes in Cindy Huang’s object exchange project: Twin Cultivation, and step into Amanda Shanley’s new studio shop, where customers are company.

As well as encouraging human relationships, uku can nurture makers’ connections with their whenua. Holding boundless histories of place and family, clay is known to participate in the untangling, rewriting or recording of a practitioner’s own story; it is elemental, archival, and yet personal. In this issue we cover the phenomenal work of Wi Taepa, Hana Pera Aoake’s wild contemporary ceramic practice, and the confounding machine componentry of Richard Penn.

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