Journal // Studio Visit with Misma Anaru

We visited the studio of local ceramicist Misma Anaru to handpick a selection of her pieces for the store. Misma has also written some words about her upbringing and creative practice.

I was raised in Kakanui, a seaside village just south of Oamaru, an upbringing every bit as lovely as it sounds - think homespun jerseys on bare bottomed children and communal bonfires at the river. From our lounge window we had a spectacular view down to the ever-changing river-mouth and ocean, and one of my earliest memories is of waking my mother up to tell her I could see a whale out at sea - but it turned out to be just black rocks.

I had two pretty incredible, idiosyncratic parents. My mother was a Maori, Buddhist, environmental activist with a fiery temper and fierce intellect. She put herself through University by correspondence whilst raising me and my two brothers. My father is a charming and sociable ex-monk hermit who has lived the last 40 years in a tiny hut in the bush just north of Kaikoura. Surrounded by his fruit trees and Rhododendrons, with Saint Francis in a goldfish pond, he cooks the same delicious stir fry every night on an open fire, attired in a selection of robes and turbans. <format> medium left

It is from him that I get one of my core life philosophes, which is - if you find you’ve spilled battery acid on your Japanese indigo kimono, just sew yourself a robe from saffron cloth! <format> medium left

Because of my upbringing I've always had a very strong sense of self - and something of an aversion to the 9-5 workday week. What I always admired the most and most wanted to be was …an artist!

For a number of years I was a photographer and the thing I liked most about it (and I say this probably because I never really knew how to work my equipment) was this notion that I was collaborating with the unknown. That light went into the camera and it made magic. I would do things like soak my films in gin or drop them in boiling water. It’s interesting to me to think about that now because what I want in my ceramics work, is to eliminate any and all kinds of chance whatsoever! I’m not seeking happy accidents, I want only consistent, reliable results - and as such my heart is always sinking into my stomach as yet another baffling mistake occurs.<format> large

The more I learn, the more I learn what I don’t know. Sometimes it feels positively Sisyphean.

When I first started making things at home we didn’t yet have a car and so I would bus and train and walk 20 minutes to get to Auckland Studio Potters in Onehunga. When I look back on that time I’m amazed that I kept at it. Most of what I made in that beginning year would be walked and trained and bused back home and then thrown immediately in the bin. My partner and I still lovingly refer to one particularly hideously glazed batch as ‘dragons vomit’.<format> medium left

I didn’t know to do test tiles, I didn’t know that glazes would look different on different clays… I didn’t know anything. But I just wanted to do it so much. The most important thing I didn’t know, was how to use a wheel. I coiled and I pinched with varying results. I thought on it and thought on it, and tried to figure out ways that clay could be something else. <format> medium right

I forgot the wheel and invented squares and rectangles. Through the limitations of not being able to throw, my whole style came to be. I began to want to make things that have a utilitarian feel to them. Things that were not just objects, but things with an actual use, a daily purpose.<format> large

One day I made a soap dish for a cube of Sphaera soap. They saw an Instagram story and asked if I would make them some more. One day I decided I wanted something to hold my tools and thus what I initially and imaginatively called ‘the tool holder’ was born.

A friend insisted ‘you could sell these’ and proved it by buying it off me. She then showed it to the lovely Joe who runs Tur and he began to stock them. <format> medium

It’s hard to overstate what these two acts of encouragement did for me. I am extremely critical of my own work. I have a very hard time with my eye being more evolved than my ability and it has been noted several times out at ASP, that I am ’never happy’ with what comes out of the kiln. I have to laugh at this. Happy in life but never happy in art.

And yet there are those moments more and more, where the thing you make is exactly the thing you were trying to make. In those moments it’s like your heart might burst.

In all honesty though I think what I love the most is not so much the medium but the actual act of making. I love the ritual of it – the setting up of the room, flowers, incense, music, audio books – then just being in that space, fully absorbed, hour after hour, bringing shapes out of nothing. <format> medium left

Most days now find me in my studio, down the end of the garden. Full of light and bees bumbling about the big windows. I’ve given it a ‘monastic prison cell - but make it cute’ aesthetic and I spend far more time fussing with the room than I should. I even faced my table to the wall for a period of time so I would be less distracted and daydreamy.<format> medium right

I might still often be unhappy in art but I am so, so happy in life.

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