Most of our Pae begin with a place. This one began with a material.
Before there was a site, before there was a design, there was a question: could a seat built to last a thousand years be made of clay?
Ceramicist Jaime Jenkins was the person to ask. Based in Tauranga Moana, she handbuilds big, slabby forms, and for this Pae she hopes to make the glazes from the dirt and rock of the place itself. She starts with loose sketches, then works the piece out with her hands in the clay. A seat built to last a thousand years asks for more design up front than usual, but the making still leads. “I believe my work is at its best when I work out the piece during making,” she says.
Clay can carry the thousand-year claim. Fired clay is one of the oldest surviving things humans make. The oldest human objects in many museums are pots.
The site almost chose itself. Driving Creek, in the Coromandel, is the pottery, railway and bush sanctuary that Barry Brickell built over fifty years, and Jaime has spent residencies there. It is hard to imagine ground that could hold a ceramic Pae better: a place where clay, conservation and one stubborn long-term vision have already been working together for decades.
Brickell bought the land in the early 1970s and protected more than 23 hectares of regenerating forest under a QEII covenant in 1993. Inside it now sits a predator-proof sanctuary, home to kererū, tūī, pāteke and the nationally vulnerable Coromandel striped gecko. Art funds the conservation. “Engineering doesn’t have to be ugly,” Brickell once said. His mantra was “not the thing but how”.
Fifty years on, the same covenanted ground is ready to hold a clay Pae.
Jaime is designing the Pae with blocks that step from low to high. The lowest is built to a child’s proportions “so they can feel drawn in and included”, she says. It is made for people to sit on together, young and old, “to either connect and converse, or absorb the wider surroundings, but still from a place of connection”.
Pottery is a long game - some firings take days, a glaze takes years to master, a pot can last millennia. The whole project is a meditation on patience, made from the earth it will sit on.
Credits:
Design: Jaime Jenkins
Partner: Driving Creek