Teresa Peters is an artist currently based in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. She works in clay, ceramics, moving image and photography. 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 in 2019. She is a production designer and filmmaker in collaboration with Florian Habicht ~ PULP: A Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets, 2014. Her film work has screened widely the international film festival circuit, including Cannes official selection.
She ‘excavates’ primordial ‘artefacts’ and navigates pseudo-archaeology and abstract geology. Molten entities in intimate combustion. Navigating the prehistoric futuristic, she fuses earth bodies into fluid digital realms and ‘archives’ them as photographic artefacts. ECHOES won the Portage Premier Ceramic Award, 2021 at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery ~ the first work in the 21 year awards history to be presented as a photograph.
DISASTROUSFORMS.COM, 2020 is a body of ceramic and clay artefacts from a faux sci-fi disaster, archived on an online platform ~ exploring natural disasters, natural history and archiving. Disaster as the mother of revolution. It is inspired by/archived with Auckland Museum Collections Online and made with the support of Creative New Zealand. Echoing Berlin club culture and drawing museum collections out into the civic centre. As Walter Benjamin observed, collections are never finished. It launched on the Auckland Live Digital Stage, as a large-scale cosmic audio-visual event in 2021.
MOLTENENTITIES.COM ~ Notes on moving mountains at RM, Gallery, as part of From things flow , July 2021 explored the transformative qualities of quartz into an audio-visual QUARTZ SOUND JOURNEY in collab with sound healer Cheryl Farthing.
ORB: PLACING INTO VIBRATION
TERESA PETERS + TORBEN TILLY + CHERYL FARTHING, Audio Foundation 2022
‘Our world is a complex matrix of vibrating energy, matter and air just as we are made of vibrations. Vibration connects us with all beings and connects us to all things interdependently…Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously ~ changing and being changed by the listening …perception at the edge of the new. Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit ~ creating a new orbit…[it] takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.’ ~ Pauline Oliveros
Teresa Peters explores ceramics as a crystalline matrix from deep time to deep house ~ transforming clay into fluid digital realms and quartz vibration. Navigating collections to collective consciousness ~ recent projects echo ‘the club’ or ‘healing circle’ as collective spaces of transformative experience. Touch as a geomorphic force. Haptics and piezoelectric pressure on quartz trigger ceramics glazes, volcanic eruptions, communication devices like mobile phones and the human third eye. We resonate with the frequencies of quartz crystals as every cell in the human body has a geometric crystalline structure. Ammonites to Ammolite ~ breaking new ground.
Spinning chthonic bodies into audio-visual spheres to create patterns of shifting moments of connection and discordance, touch as alchemy, ‘…and by touching ... put into play the whole system of the senses’. Taking cues from spectral and minimalist music traditions alongside the healing aspirations of new age and deep listening music, musician and DJ Torben Tilly explores the psychoacoustic properties of combination tones in conversation with TeresaPeters’ clay-based moving image work and the microtonal vibrations of sound healer Cheryl Farthing’s collection of quartz sounding bowls ~ used in healing for hundreds of years they ripple through the body like a natural ultrasound ~ touched by their alchemy we are forever transformed. Together they investigate a crystalline inter-connectedness manifesting an act of ‘placing-into-vibration’ .
In 2022/2023 Teresa Peters collaborated with mother Maree Horner ~ Senior New Zealand feminist artist & forerunner in the 1970s Post Object Art Movement: Land, experimental & conceptual art in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Earthed & Ground Zero, made with the support of Creative New Zealand, drew on parallels in the mother daughter practices (earth ~ body based practice and public events) and revisited Tideline 1971 as a 2022 ten minute filmic archive recreated at the orginal location, it screened on the NorthArt Digital Screen Project alongside Teresa Peters’ BLACK MOON, as part of EARTHED. In the same year Maree Horner was invited as the inaugural artist with J.C. Sturm for Door, Window, World the opening of Ruth Buchcanan’s Artspace Aotearoa.
& in 2024 her work BLACK MOON vibed as part of 625 MOONS ~ FROM SCRATCH ~ New Zealand’s iconic and ground breaking music and performance group’s 50 year celebrations produced by the Audio Foundation.
Teresa Peters extended exhibition highlights include Auckland Art Fair 2021/23, the mothermother archive (ongoing), Duty of Care ~ Institute of Modern Art Queensland, 2024, Unnerved ~ Museum of Modern Art, Queensland, 2004. The Hostess Project ~ P.P.O.W, NYC, 2010 & Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf ~ Te Tuhi, 2007.
@TERESAPETERSSTUDIO︎