Korero is a word in New Zealand Maori for exchanges of information – conversations.

This is an international exhibition where the conversations are between ceramics, one of the oldest art forms in history, and with contemporary life in all its variants.

The great American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1849, said, ‘In conversation the game is to say something new with old words’. So it is when the conversation is applied to art, particularly ceramic art, for the tools are long known and layered in antiquity but the expression must be contemporary.

Studio ceramics, along with contemporary art of many genres is deeply engaged in exchanges – with other art forms, with histories, with philosophies, with wider domains such as industrial production, with current preoccupations and spheres of contemporary life, in fact with society and culture in all its diversities, and these are often referred to in texts as ‘conversations’.