Christine Thacker is an important ceramist with an international reputation. Her works are unmistakable, distinctive and the maker’s presence is imbued in every object. Her works use metaphor and symbol, revealing a superb sense of form. Thacker builds through a process of painterly application narratives that traverse cultural dynamics peculiar to New Zealand (eg. Hotel Aotearoa I, II & III), the experience of journeying countless times between the islands of the Hauraki Gulf (the Sea Tiles) and which also explore the object’s surface, volume and mass.

On Location has two constituent parts. Thacker’s quintessential jug is a celebration of that most utilitarian object. She is attuned to all of its references and history of use, but the subject matter developed is contemporary and urban, industrialised and landscaped. This use of the surface as a canvas, the development of specific locations and the application of a narrative purpose is developed in the round. In this way, each jug becomes a reinvention of itself – it is no longer just a metaphoric symbol, it is now about living, participating and being. The image of water is used as a medium of transference, linking the city and the landscape across many of the painted jugs. Two jugs have strands of hair falling from the rim. On two others, an interlocking pattern (like fish scales) covers the crème coloured surface as if a skin.

The second group of works, the Sea Tiles, directly addresses the sensation of being at sea. The horizon line established is a key device in this, as is the depiction of the sea as a moving, living, altering, physical thing. Thacker takes the viewer out on to it, using the windowing of two shapes - circular (like the portholes of a ship) and elliptical (like that of an eye) to do this. The subject is the sea itself – patterns emerge, rhythms presented, prevailing wave direction stated; notions of threat rise and fall. Thacker explores the fugitive characteristics of the sea – its colour and energy. Scale is developed with islands shown on the horizon, and the foreground of the sea being visually dominant.