Barry Brickell

b. 1935d. 2016

Also known as:

  • Ian Barry Brickell

3 Artworks

"I am a generator. I create the amps and volts. The viewer is the lightbulb" ~ Barry Brickell

In his obituary for Barry Brickell, Gregory O’Brien described him thus: "Potter, steam-train enthusiast and trail-blazing conservationist." Hamish Keith noted the "unbroken creative continuum” in Brickell’s life’s work, calling him a "remarkable artist."

Brickell was born in New Plymouth in 1935. An early pottery enthusiast, he built his first kiln at age 7 at the family home in Devonport, Auckland. Surrounded by the estuary of the Waitematā, Barry grew up studying plant, insect and bird life, and the contrastingly muddy and volcanic geology of Tāmaki Makaurau.

While attending the University of Auckland, Brickell also studied pottery, learning techniques from Len Castle and Keith Patterson. He completed a teaching degree, landing as a trainee teacher at Coromandel District High School in 1961. Within six months he resigned, taking up pottery full time. Though teaching was not an enduring career, he maintained an interest in education, for example visiting Elwyn Richardson’s innovative Oruaiti School in Northland throughout the 1960s.

In the Coromandel Barry established the Driving Creek Railway and Pottery Studio, with workshops and kilns where he and other potters worked.

A rail and steam enthusiast, he built a railway on the property, using it to retrieve exotic timber, transporting native seedlings for reforestation and clay for use in his pottery. In his 1979 curriculum vitae, Barry lists his interests - ‘fire, steam, simple and basic machinery, botany (in particular NZ natives), landscape forms, geology, visual arts, civil engineering, railways, colonial and functional architecture and the form of things’.” (MS 2002/22 Barry Brickell Inventory, p3)

In New Zealand Potters: Their works and words (1976) Barry is recorded as helping build oil-burning kilns up and down the country through the 1950s and 1960s. “At Wellington Teachers’ College an up-draught oil-fired kiln was built by Barry Brickell together with the students” Doreen Blumhardt recounts, “experiments were carried out with a drip-feed system and with forced draught. This kiln, using an old vacuum cleaner for a blower and a hub cap for the oil to drip into, served for some years as the first stoneware kiln to be used in the area, and during the seventy-two hazardous firings some fine pots emerged. Finally in 1962 the roof around the chimney burnt and the kiln was demolished.” (p10-11)

Brickell was also a passionate conservationist, who undertook numerous projects in the Coromandel area. O’Brien suggests although the natural world was very significant for Barry, "[t]he human imagination was also central to his world view." Amidst the 27,000 native trees he planted remediating his 1.6-hectare property at Driving Creek, Barry erected "a 7m-tall terracotta sculpture, Maua Uku Ora – a god-like, guardian presence to watch over the regenerating plant and bird life."

Brickell passed away in Coromandel in 2016, aged 80, leaving a legacy of work and influences that can be seen throughout the country. His Driving Creek Railway continues to function and is a site of pilgrimage on the Coromandel for tourists, artists, and conservationists alike.

See also:

Barry Brickell, ‘Toroa’ detail from ‘The Harbour Ferries’ (1979), pictured at Driving Creek Railways.

Image: Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand, May 2024

The Harbour Ferries

The Harbour Ferries

1979

Barry Brickell

Volcanic Plateau

Volcanic Plateau

1985

Barry Brickell

Brick Column

Brick Column

1991

Russell Moses