For a quarter of a century Madeleine Child has been making popcorn.
Not the buttery, salty, puffed corn you devour while watching a movie but multicoloured ceramic pieces more suited to the coffee table or living room shelf.
"It’s just something I love to make."
Child blames her children for her obsession with popcorn shapes. On a road trip one day, the family stopped at Middlemarch and her children requested coloured popcorn, something the family never ate.
"I gave in of course and then kind of annoyingly became fascinated with its shape."
"I thought this is pure sculpture, these shapes. I can do that, I think — they’re all different. So it has kept me amused for that long."
Over the years, the popcorn has had many iterations — it has been tiny, over-sized and life-sized, brightly coloured, rough and textured, over-popped and half-popped.
"The kids sometimes say it doesn’t even look like popcorn any more, so I have to get a packet out and go through it again."
These days it does not take Child long to make the more standard ones but over the years she has gone through many different ways of making them. Some she made hollow and thin while others were stuffed with paper.
"Then I tried to make them as if it was a piece of popcorn that would pop, like one big lump of clay and kind of gouge it all out."
For a challenge Child has also tried upscaling the size of the popcorn pieces.
"If you upscale that always, in ceramics, that always changes things completely. Then you’re just working against gravity and slumping and collapsing and holding itself up."
"That was challenging because it’s nothing like just making them out in your hand with that size. If you keep them small, you just gouge your fingers through them so it’s a whole different thing.
"I kept thinking I can’t make big things."
She also experimented with making 1.8m-tall ceramic planks, which are "literally like wooden planks". Initially the plan was to cut them up and make ladders or structures if she could fit them in the kiln.
But the positive response she got from people as she decorated the surfaces made her think twice, so she decided to leave them as they were.
It was the second time Child had been to the centre. The first was in 1996 and she had always wanted to return. There were no expectations of her except to experiment and absorb the atmosphere of 20 other artists working in the space, Child was in her element.
"It’s very dreamy and everyone’s coming and going and finishing and starting but you get together for meals or something. It’s fantastic."
She plans to go back next year to finish some of the work she started and also take part in a community project suggested by the centre. It’s a new concept for her, one that after thinking about it, she decided was quite exciting.
"I’m kind of interested in doing something else, shifting slightly toward something different from making my own stuff."
The initial idea was for the project to be around saving a dilapidated little swimming lake and pools but she is not yet sure the authorities will support it.
"So we might have to think of something else."
While the idea was to take some time out, to think and explore, Child has discovered she cannot stop making. She borrowed someone’s studio and has "mucked around" with some raw work.
"I thought I’d stop making, but I can’t seem to. It’s kind of what I do."
Her obsession with ceramics began in the late ’70s when she did a popular practical ceramics course to keep her "desperate parents" off her back. It suited young students like her who did not know what they wanted to do.
But it was not until she saw an exhibition of contemporary British ceramics at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery that the idea of ceramic pottery as an art form, something that could be shown in a gallery, occurred to her.
"I’d never seen it before. These were not functional; they were abstract works. It was eye-opening and I thought it was exciting."
"I feel fortunate I found something I love doing every single day and I kind of can’t do anything else, so at some point you think, well you’ve got to make this work."
When she returned to New Zealand, she settled in Dunedin where her parents were living and taught at the Dunedin School of Art until 2011 becoming a senior lecturer and head of school.
"We bought the beach house at Aramoana and that kind of cemented us to the place."
In the years since she has had success in a variety of competitions including the Norsewear Art Awards, Waiheke Ceramic Awards, Gold Coast International Ceramics Art Awards, Sidney Myer International Ceramics Awards and the NZ Society of Potters Awards.
She was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards in 2006-08, 2011, 2012 and 2014, winning the Jury Award in 2013. And as well as being a finalist nine times in the Portage awards, she jointly won the Premiere Award in 2009 alongside longtime collaborator Philip Jarvis and former Dunedin-based ceramic artist Jim Cooper.
Child says she is a big fan of competitions as she enjoys the way they push her outside her comfort zone and get her to try new things.
"For me, they’re always a great opportunity to push your work in some other way, and you don’t have to send it in if you’re not happy with it."
Her entry in this year’s Portage awards is another of her popcorn sculptures, this time made as a maquette that she was trying different surface ideas out on as she was away from her workshop with her usual glazes.
"So pen and pencil on the surface and mucking around with that, and then in the end I thought, ‘oh, why not just leave it?’ Ceramics is thick with rules, which I think are there to be broken mostly."
When home in Dunedin she works from an old studio in Leith St, which has its own wood-fired kiln. She has recently created an incorporated society to enable a group of potters to work from the space.
"It is really exciting. Quite a few of them are ex-students from art school and they’re kind of running it now but I still have a space there. They’re all enthusiastic, clever and making interesting work."
To see:
Portage Ceramic Awards finalists, Te Uru, Auckland, November 22 to February 23.
