No.1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1956-2016

108 №1 NEIGHBOUR STRONG WOMEN Mary Gole is a potter whose work is inspired by the rich diversity of pottery traditions from across Papua New Guinea and the strength of the country’s women. She came to prominence in the early 1980s with her highly sculptural pottery and distinctive textile designs. Gole’s practice stems from the rich traditions of the Orokaiva people of Oro Province, but her creations are undeniably contemporary. CAN YOU TELL US HOW YOU CAME TO BE A POTTER? My mother’s great grandmother was a potter. My mother used to tell me that her mother was a potter from Kewena Village of the Northern Province [now Oro Province], and nobody else, no other clans are allowed to do that artwork. It belonged only to her clan. My mother used to sit down under the coconut tree. First thing in the morning, she would go and get some vegetables, come home and cook them in a pot, while she was making her pots. I never really sat down and learnt. My mother asked me a few times: ‘You come and sit down and I’ll show you’, and I did. She was coiling it up and I had no patience and said, ‘OK, mother, I seen it’, and then I just take off. I never came back and asked questions. I was too carried away with my young life. Later, I married an Australian man and went to live with him in Sydney. He got a job in outback New South Wales and we lived in an old farmhouse in Brewarrina, where he was working for a time. I was digging in the yard, trying to make a garden and, at the same time, I came across ground that was very soft, so I picked it up and started coiling it and thought: ‘This is it. This is what my mother used to tell me’, so I started potting in Brewarrina, just for myself. I went back to Sydney during a break, and met some women from Sylvania Waters and they asked if I could show them how to make a Papua New Guinean pot. There was the memory of my mother coiling and beating the clay with a stick, so I started coiling and making little things to show these women. Then my husband and I came back to PNG and I started taking it really seriously at the Waigani Arts Centre in Port Moresby. There I was teaching expatriate ladies to hand-build pots. Sometimes I got 20 to 30 women in my classes. But the raskols, they used to come and take my students’ cars and rob them. 1 I felt uncomfortable, so I pulled out and got a studio under my Hohola house and that’s where I work now. 2 Diplomats and ambassadors ring me and ask, ‘Do you have any pots for sale?’. They are from Israel, Germany, lots of places. They come and get the pots, so my pots are all over the world. HOW DID THE ‘FACE POTS’ COME ABOUT? My mother used to make round water storage pots, which she coiled without any designs. The face of a woman, that’s my idea to show people that women in PNG work very hard — they go to the garden, get vegetables and come back, with their string bag full of food and a baby on top of the food, and with the firewood on top of their head. Women do lots of work in PNG. The face pot is a symbol for women in PNG. THE FINISH ON YOUR WORKS IS QUITE DISTINCTIVE. CAN YOU EXPLAIN YOUR PROCESS? I use seaweed and sometimes I sprinkle cooking salt while the pots are cooking. I use sawdust and some leaves for the cooking, like when you BBQ and you turn MARY GOLE INTERVIEW BY RUTH M c DOUGALL