Marla Tregidga

Tregidga was born at Ohope and spent thirty-one years as a recorder technician on a geothermal field inland from Kawerau, changing smoked paper on seismograph drums and inking the styli every second morning. She read those charts the way other people read weather: one thin line, hours of nothing, then a flinch. She began potting at forty-one in a shed behind the house because the clay in the river cutting up the road was free, and she has never bought a bag of clay in her life. She still has the exercise books from the drums.

The jars are coiled and paddled to about ninety centimetres, from river clay cut with a fifth of crushed pumice so the walls survive a four-day firing. She loads pine and manuka into a brick kiln built with her brother-in-law and sits up four nights with a thermos, writing temperatures in a school exercise book. In 1988 she pushed too hard through the first day and fourteen of nineteen pots bloated and split along the shoulder. Since then the first day is deliberately boring, and she says so as though it were a moral position.

Perhaps sixty jars exist. She breaks what she dislikes with a lump hammer, in front of people, without ceremony. She makes no lids, glazes nothing on the inside, and tells anyone who mentions flowers that a jar is not for flowers. She will not fire electric and will not ship: buyers drive to Ohope, are given tea in a mug she did not make, and carry the pot to the car themselves. Two dealers have stopped telephoning, which she reports as a result rather than a loss.