I found my way to the work of John Parker not through Lucie Rie and crafty

modernism, but through junk shops and flea markets in the late 1970s and

early 1980s. Along with many of my friends I spent a lot of that time, and

as little money as possible, hunting for treasure amongst the trash.

While others built up formidable collections of Poole or Susie Cooper, I

concentrated on plain, white vases and bowls from Crown Devon, Spode, Crown

Lynn or Keith Murray's Wedgwood. I didn't have any real knowledge of their

provenance other than a kind of vague nationalism about Crown Lynn and, by

extension, Murray.

It was only with Gail Lambert's book on New Zealand pottery and other

reading about modernism in the late 1980s that I was able to fit my

impulses into any kind of context. Despite (or perhaps because of) an

intense immersion in the politics of pottery around the same time,  I never

did make a connection with the mainstream of contemporary New Zealand

ceramics. I did, however, find John Parker and in his work the architecture

of forms and surfaces which had obsessed me in the studio ware I had

collected so avidly.

I now have 12 Parkers, most of them white. They cluster around the house,

mingling with the Crown Lynn. For me they are a celebration of  the search

for the ideal and the impossibility of ever quite attaining it.  They

embody the satisfaction that comes from the constant re-solving of a

limited but profound set of problems.

Frank Stark is the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Film Archive and has

been a journalist, editor, film maker and, for a time, Director of the

Crafts Council.