John Parker

John Parker (born 1947) is a New Zealand ceramicist and theatre designer.

Early life John Parker was born in Auckland, New Zealand on 7 July 1947. Between 1952 and 1965 he attended Panmure Bridge Primary, Tamaki Intermediate, Howick District High School, Tamaki College and the University of Auckland.

Recalling his time at the RCA in 1990, Parker said:

"I discovered commercial stains, industrial techniques; I started working with porcelain, using an electric wheel and firing with electricity. I'd always been interested in starkness, and the purity of form and control and in black and white. Firing with electricity at college gave me the control that I'd been battling against in the cone 10 reduction syndrome. Now I could eliminate random flash effects; I even started to spray glazes."

Ceramics career

Parker began night classes with potter Margaret Milne in Auckland in 1966, when he was 19.

In 1967 he built a stoneware kiln with Grant Hudson, and in 1969 became a member of the World Crafts Council. In 2013 he was a finalist in the Portage Ceramic Awards with the work Waitakere Still Life of Ernie and Keith and Ewald, a group of white lustre vases which referenced key potters Ernest Shufflebotham, who designed for Crown Lynn in New Zealand, Keith Murray, who trained Shufflebotham at Wedgwood, and Swedish designer Ewald Dahlskog, whose ceramics shown in London in the 1930s had inspired Murray.

Key influences include Hans Coper, who was his tutor at the Royal College, and Lucie Rie, a long-term mentor and friend.

In 1988 he said about his work:

Most of the shapes I work in go against the natural organic tendencies of clay and gravity. You have to make up new techniques to get what you want. I will use anything to aid the process of getting there. I am very Machiavellian when it comes to masking tape and string. I tend to throw blanks as finely as I can and severely turn them into the precise shapes I intend. I use metal kidneys most of the time and work on any surface I can reach. I stretch and coax rather than throw shapes. Bowls are always turned inside and out. I am not interested in the random and the spontaneous. I want to be better than a lathe, more plastic than plastic. I have a considerable failure rate at all stages of the process. If you are not losing work, you know you are not pushing things far enough. I like working on a tightrope and in areas I don't know anything about. In Profiles: 24 New Zealand Potters he noted:

Having been a self-employed potter most of my working life, I find the newer areas of theatre design and writing about film are similarly very time-consuming and labour-intensive. All my interests are visual. They all concern the drama of reactions to shape and colour and arrangement. They are all theatrical. There was a time when I suspected I only made pots to be able to display them.

In September 2016 Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery launched John Parker: Cause and Effect, an exhibition and accompanying publication of the same name, celebrating Parker's 50 years of practice. In October 2016 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa opened John Parker: Handmade Precision.

Theatre career Parker is a set designer for theatre and performing arts. He has designed over 23 productions drama and musical theatre with Auckland Theatre Company including The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Mum’s Choir, Middle Age Spread, The Rocky Horror Show, Noises Off, Waiting For Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildernstein Are Dead, Into The Woods and The Glass Menagerie. Other productions he has done the set design for include opera's Pagliacci and Il Trovatore and New Zealand play Waiora.

Awards and recognitions

In 1999 Parker was made a life member of Auckland Studio Potters and awarded the Waitakere City Millennium Medal for services to the community. In 2010 he was recognised with a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.