Value of craft increases in the face of a finite world

by Kristine Walsh
I N one of those life-imitating-art scenarios, Huw Lloyd’s history as a potter reads like the history of modern potting itself.
Lloyd got into ceramic art because, like other potters through the ages, he wanted to make beautiful objects that had a utilitarian purpose. In the 1980s he got out of it because, with the deregulation of imports, a deluge of cheap crockery saturated the market. And in recent years he has got back into it because, he believes, people are once again appreciating the part handcrafted objects play in the living of a sustainable life.
“Of course there are other reasons, too,” Lloyd says of the decision made a decade ago to refire his kiln. “With my children grown, there was no one to please but myself so that gave me the freedom to revisit some unfinished business
. . . that dream of being a full-time artist.”
These days, it appears that Lloyd is not just pleasing himself. His entry in the 2011 Portage Ceramic Awards — New Zealand’s most prestigious competition for ceramic artists — so pleased the judges that they named it a finalist and included it in the Portage exhibition, on show at Auckland’s Lopdell House gallery until early December.
But in reaching that point he negotiated a long road, one peppered with the tests faced by many artists, particularly the challenges of raising a family while maintaining an active creative life.
For Lloyd, that journey started nearly 45 years ago when, as young Welshman, he started studying graphic design at Newport Art School, not far from the Welsh capital of Cardiff.
That didn’t last long — “I decided I didn’t want to be a tool for selling other people’s product” — so he dropped out and moved to the Brecon countryside.
“I decided that I wanted to live a simple life, to go back to basics, to reinvent my ambitions for the future,” he said. “I realised that what I wanted was to have a creative life and to have a family that I could support within that context.”
From there, the leap to pottery was not a large one. It served a useful domestic purpose while satisfying both the makers’ creative leanings and, given an outlet, their need to make a living.
So Lloyd moved again, this time to Swansea where he went to art school (1971-1974) where Staffordshire-trained potters taught him techniques from throwing and casting to making sculptural and slab forms.
Then he moved again, he and wife Sue immigrating to New Zealand and settling in Otago where he taught art at a high school.
“We decided to go for a trip around the North Island and, for us, everything about Gisborne just seemed to click. It had a warmer climate, a different atmosphere, and was it was not nearly as monocultural.”
Still committed to sustainable living the Lloyd family — by then swelled by the arrival of the first two of their three children — in 1977 moved to the East Coast settlement of Rangitukia where they lived largely off the land and where both parents made pottery, selling it at market days in Ruatoria or travelling to Gisborne to seek other outlets.
But by 1982 the family, which by then had its full complement of offspring, decided to live in Gisborne to give their children access to more education options.
First they rented a home and shop in the beachside street of Salisbury Road, not far from where Huw Lloyd now lives in a charmingly ramshackle composite construction made up of Turn to page 30