Writer for the month: Moyra Elliott

Precious Little by Mel Robson

These simple small vessels connect domestic trappings with the narratives embedded within them in the form of memories. These stories are evoked through recognition of the surface imagery and associations with the personal. Maps, sewing patterns, letters and other texts all lend themselves to this strategy which responds to current interest in decoration and narrative.

For me there are other layers that run parallel. Some histories of porcelain relate how news of its wonders reached Europe by written missive before the first pieces actually arrived. Once they did, it started a frenzy of experiments to duplicate its white strength and this research produced soft and hard paste bodies that did not quite deliver. More significantly, the earliest texts in existence are scribed into clay, and four thousand year old payment demands for grain and goods can be seen, still in their enclosing clay envelopes, in an Istanbul Museum. It's the stuff of raised hairs at back of the neck. Then there is that haptic thing. Just by looking at the imaged delicate translucence it's possible to sense how that cool, sugary, sensuousness would feel to the fingertips. Porcelain is rich stuff indeed and this porcelain sustains a discourse that connects to contemporary art concerns but it does so in terms which also celebrate the specificity of ceramics.

Moyra Elliott lives in Auckland, New Zealand and often refers herself ‘an odd-job person in the arts'. She works as a free-lance curator, writer and consultant on a range of projects in the applied arts. She is frequently a juror and serves on the Board of Objectspace – a project for innovation in craft practice.

2006 projects include:

2005 projects include: