Coming from a family of makers, I am happiest when I am creating things with my hands. My earliest years were living in a family of Italian heritage in the beautiful Waikawau Valley on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. It was isolated, very beautiful and wild with black sand beaches, steep hillsides, native bush and a diet of crayfish, whitebait, wild pork and delicious New Zealand lamb and beef that my father farmed.

It was a very isolated farming community where we made everything we needed for ourselves. My parents made our bread, our butter, grew all our vegetables and fruit and practiced nose to tail eating because that’s what one did. It was a totally self-sufficient lifestyle, nothing was wasted. The nearest petrol station, diary (corner store) and pub were 30 kilometres away along a single tracked road with grass growing down the middle.

The local school was very tiny averaging 8-10 children both Maori and Pakeha. Our swimming pool was the local river and the ocean. Both the school, and the river were on my father’s farm – about a kilometre walk from the homestead.

As children we made our own play. There were no bought toys. We learnt from local Maori how to make dolls out of flax and how to make windmills out of raupo reeds. We built bush huts, tree huts and Maori grass huts. We made rooms in the hay shed and played in the wool shed. We cut up and melted down old drain pipes to make lead sinkers. We hunted kaura (fresh water crayfish) and eels cooking them on open fires with watercress collected from the creek.

There were also lots of chores to help mum and dad – feeding the chooks and collecting the eggs, taking the calf off the cow on milking days, helping dad with the killing of our meat or working in the shearing shed and in between our chores we played.

Our whole playtime was creating things and making up adventures to do on the farm, in the bush or down by the river where we collected fossil stones after heavy rains and flooding.

It was a fabulous, wild childhood of making play and making things. It is deeply embedded (ingrained) in my nature to make things, so it wasn’t surprising to find myself making things with clay in the late 1970s.

My first foray into pottery was at a night class at Western Springs college, which was where I was working and living and I loved it, however, I didn’t do it seriously until after my daughter was born at which point I attended the Auckland Studio Potters for two years doing a night class once a week.

My teacher for the first year was Patricia Perrin  before I moved to John Parker for the second year. John had recently returned from London where he had studied for his MFA at the Royal College of Art. He was an excellent teacher and I spent a year questioning and arguing with him about form and ceramics until I finally understood. Start a pot strongly and definitely from the base upwards, finish it in the same way at the top and it doesn’t matter too much what you do in the middle. This has been my practice since then.

During this period, I became friends with Lex Dawson and through him many other potters. Raku days at Brain Gartside’s place; weekends at Barry Brickell’s where we drank copious amounts of red wine, talked pots, rode trains and made beautiful clay that I hand built with; and so on.

I made pots, built kilns, participated in exhibitions, symposiums and parented my daughter and gradually worked my way to slip casting and hand painting functional ceramic vessels, where the focus of my work became the relationship between form and it’s surface treatment; and colour theory.

New Zealand pottery in the 70’s and 80’s was steeped in the Bernard Leach studio pottery ethos, causing my use of ‘slip casting’ and hand painting to be severely out of step with what was considered ‘acceptable’. It took many years for potters such as Richard Parker and Peter Shearer to express respect for the slip casting and decorating techniques I had developed.

The one person who was always interested and supportive of what I was embracing in my work was John Parker

Because decoration, in the studio potters’ community, was not embraced, and with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Adolf Loos 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’, in 1992 I named my gallery/retail outlet ‘Crimes of Adornment’.