David Walker

Throughout my career as a potter I have taken part in and had work selected into many exhibitions and galleries throughout NZ. I have also been invited to give workshops, act as exhibition selector and guest exhibitor for various Potters Associations NZ wide: including Canterbury Potters Association, Halswell, Shirley, Mt Pleasant and Rangiora Potters Associations, Ashburton Potter’s Association (several times), West Coast, Timaru, Nelson and Wellington. My training as a potter involved intensive learning in all facets of producing domestic stoneware and selling to a NZ market through studios and galleries. This met a need (or dream) of being allowed to live a creative, self-sustaining lifestyle and my children able to grow up happily in two beautiful rural areas of NZ: Nelson and Banks Peninsula. Although I have had no formal art training beyond secondary school, my initial interest has always been towards painting and drawing. A need to draw has been a wonderful tool in my development of skills and the formation of ideas in using clay as a creative medium. I also recognise and utilise one medium as important and endlessly fascinating narrative for the other. Currently a lot of my clay work explores a slightly more sculptural aspect which has grown from the making and appreciation of objects for functional day to day use. Clay being a tactile piece of earth and ancient in its geological formation easily inspires a sense of the archaic and collective ethnicity through it’s use. In this respect I love to create the illusion of objects made in other times and places, the act of making provides a point of fascination and curiosity for the imagination to travel from.