Page 40 - Constructing Craft

an English country pottery. Woodnorth had been a potter in Staffordshire in England

but had emigrated to New Zealand in 1875 because of his wife’s health. The pottery
suffered from many of the difficulties that plagued most potteries in New Zealand –

lack of capital, high transportation costs and the inability to compete on price with
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British pottery – and by 1883 Woodnorth was bankrupt.

In the 1920s and 1930s a number of potters, often working alone, would provide

examples for the post-war studio craft movement. Jova Rancich, a Yugoslav

immigrant, set up his pottery in New Lynn in Auckland in the early 1930s. Although
Rancich died in 1942 he had trained Wally Silva who established Sylvian Pottery

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which operated until 1949. Studio potters would look to their work as examples of
indigenous handmade pottery.

The potter at work. Jova Rancich, New Lynn, 1930.
Photo: Una Garlick, Auckland Memorial Museum.

Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, craftspeople seeking to learn the skills of pottery

could visit a very small numbers of potters who traced the roots of their craft back to
the nineteenth century. In Hawke’s Bay Huelin Fulford, the son of an early brick

and pipe works owner, John Fulford, set up Te Mata Pottery in 1923. Fulford would

Constructing Craft