Award-winning artwork captures the ephemeral beauty of ceramics

Elam School of Fine Arts alumnus Wendelien Bakker won the 2024 Portage Ceramic Award for a work inspired by the fading days of summer and a longing to be near water.

Held on 21 November, the Portage awards are part of an annual exhibition that celebrates the diversity of contemporary ceramics in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Bakker’s work, Sea of Grass, consists of ripples of unfired porcelain clay strewn across a backyard, where they gradually dissolve into the grass. In the gallery, the work is presented as three photographs that have been reproduced as photocopies, which are offered to the audience to take home. The work’s exploration of impermanence is mirrored in the parallel between the porcelain’s fleeting nature and the diminishing availability of the photocopies.

It received high praise from judge Kate Newby, who said the work defies conventional expectations of sculpture.

“Sea of Grass is in constant flux, always changing, always happening. You can’t pin it down, because it exists in multiple forms and at varying stages of transformation. The porcelain may dissolve into the grass, but it still lives on through the documentation. It forces us to question: Where is the work? Is it in the porcelain? The photographs? The space in which the porcelain disappears, or the homes where the prints eventually end up?”

Newby said what she loved most was the sense of impermanence.

“The piece doesn’t demand to be preserved or fixed in time. It embraces the ephemeral nature of materials and the environment, echoing cycles of creation, decay, and renewal. It’s refreshing to encounter a work that isn’t trying to outlast its surroundings, but instead integrates itself into them.”

Originally from the Netherlands and Ōtautahi Christchurch, Bakker is now based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and returned to Aotearoa to complete her Master of Fine Arts at Elam in 2016.

The idea for Sea of Grass came to her at the end of a hot summer.

“I always yearn to live next to a body of water. Sea of Grass was a work that when I went out to collect the washing at dusk, I could squint my eyes and imagine waves lapping quietly,” she says.

Initially, she considered firing the clay on the lawn but found the raw porcelain naturally weathering in the grass to be more harmonious with the environment.

“Letting the stacks of photocopies diminish as the porcelain does in the backyard felt like an appropriate way to share this work. I also work with firing clay removing the water – but this time, I was letting water in, which is an interesting contrast.”

Sea of Grass is one of 40 works from the award finalists, many of whom are Elam graduates, that will be on display at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery until 23 February.