6th - 28th september

Dancing with light, earth, air and fire

In 2023 and again in 2024, we were transported to a different world for a month-long residency at Driving Creek Railway and Pottery in Coromandel — a magical place where pots rise from the earth, and the community carry the spirit of Barry Brickell’s vision.

There, like many others before us, we worked side by side, enjoying the company and knowledge of the beautiful people who care for DCR, sharing laughter, long talks, amazing food, ginger wine, and our lives around the kitchen table. Nights fell to the call of ruru; mornings broke with kererū feasting in the mulberry tree outside our cabins. We walked in the regenerated bush, watched the tide breathe, and let the land and community fold us into their rhythms.

These past few years have also been marked by loss — beloved souls whose light, kindness, and presence shaped us are no longer here. In their absence, we have turned to our roots: speaking with family, travelling to the lands of our ancestors, and listening for the threads that bind past to present. As gardeners as well as makers, our hands are in the soil as often as in the clay — planting what our ancestors planted, tending flowers they would have known, carrying their stories in living colour and scent. From this has grown a deep gratitude, and a desire to honour these connections in our work.

Our styles may speak in different voices, but they meet in balance — light with shadow, fragility with strength, the pale alongside the vivid. Flowers, like light, weave through this exhibition as symbols of heritage and renewal — their colours and forms echoing the rhythms of the garden, the clay, and the friendships that sustain us. This is our meeting place, shaped by a time of shared work, and carried forward by the bond we have as friends and makers.

Lorraine Barnett & Karen Seccombe