An online store with worldwide shipping will sell you a terracotta vase covered in molluscs – brought ashore on receipt of order. The store is headquartered in Budapest, which is 500 kilometers from the nearest coastline, the Adriatic Sea – it’s fun to imagine someone wading into the River Danube and dodging transit boats to retrieve a vase the size of a seven-year-old.

Of the ceramic forms pervasive in our homes, the vase is king. There’s something in the form’s slippage between sculpture and functional ceramic, which the teapot would have a harder time arguing, but mostly congratulations are in order for antiquity artists who penned a design prototype with serious legs. Georgia Tikaputini Douglas Hood studied design, and while she considers her work as an uku artist antipode to screen-bound and deliverable-led contemporary design practice, she has an eye for it.

Neoclassical pottery conventions associated with Georgian and Victorian Britain have been a key reference for Hood this far. Before becoming a symbol of the Enlightenment, Greco-Roman vessel forms like the amphora [1] (or amphorae) were largely everyday objects made and used for the transportation and storage of standardised quantities of wet and dry goods. There are fine examples, like the 2,500-year-old amphora depicting one of Hercules twelve labours that was the jewel of the Australian National University’s collection before it was revealed to be stolen property by the specialist art squad of Italy’s military police. The humble kind routinely dug up on the grounds of Italian rustico might have more in common with an airport Pump bottle. But the veneration of the vase was mastered by the powers of empire, and so it spread.

Hood’s engagement with uku is an everyday one, as is her negotiation and subversion of the ceramic histories she references, so often tied to societies instrumental in the colonisation of Aotearoa. She describes her practice as intuitive, as fluctuating in line with the feeling underfoot as she stands in te ao Māori. Hood grew up knowing her whakapapa, she attended full immersion Rumaki Māori primary school, not in her rohe of Ngāti Rangiwewehi, but in an urban environment, and her job now, outside of the studio, is kaupapa Māori. Design school – she’s studied at three, spanning technical to creative practice – offered drastic newness and alienation. Then she started working with the whenua.

Talking at Hood’s Tāmaki Makaurau studio, a large unfired work watched us from its high perch on a shelf. It looked heavy enough to be hard to put up there. A suite of work was in the kiln. All of Hood’s works are hand built – the body with thick coils of clay, the thicker the better, before she carves away to reveal the form. Sometimes she will pick up a pencil beforehand, but the physicality of making with her hands, and at this scale, helps the uku weigh in on its design. Hood relates to the work most when it is unfired and by technical classification isn’t ceramic or pottery but still clay: a soak away from a fresh slate. The vessel on the shelf features large, curved handles, the forms cut from a slab and affixed. Handles like these – both familiar to and deeply unlike the symmetrical sweeping handles of pots of yore – are also weighty. The ‘bigness’ of Hood’s work makes them risky partners in the firing process, but there is joy in that for her, and their bulky proportions belie the preciousness of their borrowed forms. Richard Fahey describes the vase as “a long-established functional form that has regularly been invoked for its decorative potential by historical practitioners of an ornamental persuasion.” [2] A big vase has a generous surface.

In Āmene, Grace Aotearoa’s debut solo exhibition of works by Hood, a glazed stoneware vessel titled Spiralling appeared ornamented with rounded, uniform pleats wrapping diagonally from mouth to belly to foot. Appearing as two sections with the head terminating above a narrower neck, this lip is an undulating ruffle to adorn a triumph of a pot. The rhythmic surface treatments Hood is experimenting with reference tukutuku panels in their directionality and repetition. They tell a story of making in clay – prep, coil, build, carve, cut, join, glaze, fire, repeat. The surface could also have been peeled from a fluted column bordering a ticketed Athenian ruin, but look closer and the presence of Hood’s hand jets you back to Aotearoa – standing with your feet in the whenua conjuring a neoclassical urn to mind.

On the wall of Hood’s studio is an image of Richard Parker leaning over a row of seven-year-old sized vases. A defining figure in Aotearoa ceramics, Parker laid his foundations in studio ceramics before building his own unique ceramics vocabulary across four-decades of practice. His pots do not possess the uniform profile and symmetry of wheel thrown work (neither do Hood’s, but neither are), nor the lightness, balance, or gravity-bound proportions favoured in the cannon of clay things; “what is clear, however, is that Parker has his own picture in mind of what a pot should look like.” [3] Hood’s own ceramics express an earnest confidence in her own view of things. Guided by her whakapapa and the whenua, and that rare combination of ‘design reference magpie’ and ‘intuitive studio practitioner’, she’s certainly got room to move.

[1] ‘A form of storage vessel widely used in ancient Greece and throughout the Roman empire. Charactered by two handles, a neck narrower than the body and a pointed base, it was one of the main vessel shapes in Greek pottery.’ Glenn Barkley, Ceramics: An Atlas of Forms (Thames & Hudson Australia, 2023), 8.

[2] Richard Fahey, Richard Parker: Master of Craft, ed. Gillian Tewsley (Objectspace, 2011), 18

[3] Fahey, Richard Parker: Master of Craft, 64