Teresa Peters
“Teresa Peters ECHOBONE 2019 – mothermother project #3
The mothermother project, threads women artists into a non-linear evolving web. In revolutionary times it is imperative to be part of a platform that promotes women artists in Aotearoa. My ceramic work ECHO BONE 2019 finding immediate echoes amongst Monique Lacey’s crushed modernism, Inga Fillary’s dirt works, and Natalie Tozer’s future fossils. As I flew around our sweet world last August 2019 dreaming of pink palaces in fantasies soon to be the reality of the French Riveria’. ECHO BONE was left hanging in it’s own pink palace, in exhibition as part of the Creative Studio Residency 2019 at Studio One Toi Tu.
A visitor described ECHO BONE 2019 as an Italian sixties sci-fi space ship. He then proceeded to expound the tale of his recent two-month coma, after being hit by a truck in Milan. After which, he woke up as if in a Fellini meets David Cronenberg film and was to learn that a high percentage of the bones in his body has been replaced with titanium including his spine.
After wading through the 2019 Venice Biennale’s May We Live in Interesting Times’ apocalyptic musings for a million hours, legs as jellyfish. Natalie Tozer called me in Venice around 2am. We discussed that Judy Darragh had invited ECHO BONE into the mothermother project’s third iteration. We talked into the humid night deliriously about Katja Novitskova’s Pattern of Activation (Mutants) 2018 and Earthware Series 2019, that I had just seen at Hamburger Bahnhof’s Preis der Nationalegalerie 2019. The ECHO BONE series is made to evolve in rhizomic fashion featuring hundreds of possible interactive entities. Back in my Ponsonby road ceramics studio I selected a darker more intense body this time.
ECHO BONE is interested in bodies. Earth bodies, forming and transforming. Chemical compounds and molten entities, in intimate combustion. ECHO BONE ‘excavates primordial totems’, as we move through the Anthropocene, the epoch where human activity took dominant effect on the environment. My ceramic installations are interested in rhizomic multiplicity, nomadic transformation and the tentacular. The merging of biomorphic and anthropomorphic forms. Ceramics is alchemy. Earth, water, air… fire.
mothermother #3. ECHO BONE’S contemporary ceramic installation exhibited alongside judy darragh and kelly pretty. These three diverse practices find their marriage all rooted in contemporary interpretations and subversions of craft. judy darragh’s trade mark utilisation of unexpected craft and repurposed materials. These gemstone works bound in a cosmic kaleidoscope of fishnet stockings and neon spray paint, kelly pretty’s delicate embroidered interpretations of her son Hieronymus’s urban drawings. Her life, art and gardening practice - holistic. A few weeks earlier I had seen the real deal Bosch’s Gardens of Earthly Delights 1515, in an exhibition of the same name at Martin Groupius Bau, Berlin, featuring many earthly beauties.
While continuing to ponder earth matters. It seemed only obvious to invite and align my work with that of Natalie Tozer herself. Our work crosses terra territories. Both deeply interested in prehistoric/futuristic fossils and findings and everything Timothy Morton. We were aptly joined by the apocalyptic paintings of emma smith, as the fourth iteration of the mothermother project darkly mused on the fate of our mother… Mother Earth.”
Teresa Peters x mothermother 2020
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of Gareth Moon.
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of the Cheyenne Rose.
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of Cheyenne Rose.
ECHOBONE, series selects 2019. Image courtesy of Nat Tozer.
Teresa Peters is an artist and a filmmaker in collaboration with Florian Habicht. She currently works in clay, ceramics and moving image, ‘Excavating’ primordial totems and navigating pusedo - archaeology as we move through the anthropocene. Earth bodies, forming and transforming - molten entities in intimate combustion.
On returning from Berlin and New York in 2015 she completed her PGDipFA at Elam and was the Studio One Toi Tu Creative Ceramics Resident 2018/19. DISASTROUSFORMS.COM, 2020 explores collections to collective consciousness, from volcanoes, corals, and fossils to the quartz in your mobile phone. As Walter Benjamin observed, collections are never finished. It is inspired by and archived with Auckland Museum Collections Online as a Topic, made with the support of Creative New Zealand, and launched on the Auckland Live Digital Stage, as an audio- visual event in 2021.
In 2021 she exhibited at Auckland Art Fair - Piki Mai: Up Here and TENT, with mothermother and RM Gallery and MOLTENENTITIES.COM at RM Gallery, in group show From Things Flow. Her work ARTEFACTS was the recipient of the Pack and Send Merit award, in the Ceramics NZ 60th National Jubilee Exhibition 2021, Dunedin. This summer ECHOES won the Portage Premier Ceramic Award 2021, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. It is the first Premier work in the 21 year awards history to be presented as a photograph.
Her film work has screened widely in international film festivals, including Cannes official selection. Previous exhibitions include: Woodenhead, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, 2010, Who Is Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, at Te Tuhi, 2007, and later at P.P.O.W Gallery, NYC, 2010.