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Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole OL / Orokaiva people / Oro Province, Papua New Guinea b.1941 / Water storage pot – woman’s face 2013 / Hand-thrown-earthenware with incised decoration and beeswax / 33.5 x 33.4 x 33.2cm / Purchased 2015. QAGOMA Foundation / Collection: QAGOMA / © Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole OL
Joyce Mary Arasepa GoleWater storage pot – woman’s face 2013
Not Currently on Display
The head and face of Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole’s Water storage pot – woman’s face is an iconic image created to acknowledge and honour the significance of women in Papua New Guinea.
Gole explains that the face evokes that of her mother, a village woman who worked hard from daybreak to dusk nurturing produce from the garden, carrying firewood and water, and cooking and caring for her four children. Gole’s mother also created pots to carry and store the family’s water, and in which to prepare meals. Gole has shared stories of her digging the clay out of the earth, carrying it home and then beating it with a stick into elegant spherical vessels.1 Gole attributes the feeling that she has for clay — the knowledge that exists in her hands — to watching her mother rolling and coiling the textured earth. As a young girl, Gole watched occasionally and from a distance; now she wishes that she had accepted the invitations to come closer, to sit with her mother, listen to the stories and receive her wisdom, but she was ‘too carried away with (her own) young life’.2
Endnotes:
1 Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole, interview with Ruth McDougall, October 2019.
2 Ruth McDougall, ‘Mary Gole: Interview by Ruth McDougall’, in No. 1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1966–2016, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2016, p.108.
Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole is one of Papua New Guinea’s pioneering female artists — and one of the country’s only ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ potters. Her unique art chronicles the everyday lives of Papua New Guinean women and men as they negotiate a mixture of new and old ways of living, drawing on centuries-old traditions and marrying them with contemporary practices.
The elegant pots and figurines that Gole taught herself to create in her adult years are inspired by women, such as her mother, and the rich diversity of pottery traditions that they nurtured — but the distinctive vessels and sculptures are undeniably her own. Working with commercial clay, Gole uses traditional techniques to build her earthenware, decorating them with her own designs and signature rich black colouring achieved through applying a mix of seaweed, salt, sawdust and leaves to the pot and turning it gently in a low-temperature fire.
Many of the figurines respond to stories Gole has read in the Post Courier (a daily national newspaper) and record aspects of daily life. Others, such as men dressed as warriors or in traditional dress, are a reflection on the loss of practices that once defined and directed the conduct of Papua New Guinea’s young men.