Artist Bernie Winkels’ property is busy with a self-defined put-it-together-mate composition of handmade objects placed about. There are various studio spaces within his and his partner, Maelyn’s, home and gardens. The shed is a dedicated wet area for his clay wheel and the garage is repurposed into a ceramics studio. Of course, there is always plenty of tea on hand too.
Artist Bernie Winkels’ property is busy with a self-defined put-it-together mate composition of handmade objects placed about. There are various studio spaces within his and his partner, Maelyn’s, home and gardens. The shed is a dedicated wet area for his clay wheel and the garage is repurposed into a ceramics studio. Of course, there is always plenty of tea on hand too.
A prolific practising artist for over twenty years, Bernie is a keenly focused multi-medium, contemporary artist who exhibits nationwide. He is recognised as a sculptural ceramist and for his painting, and he and Maelyn are both supportive creatives within the Hawke’s Bay contemporary arts and ceramics scene. “We’ve got a good thing going on here in the Bay; in all creative forms it’s an exciting place to be.”
Bernie admits, early on he was always escaping into his imagination. Through his telling, it is clear he was a determined person from the onset. Curious and questioning, he preferred to find out things for himself and held a natural scepticism for what others said. These days, he pitches this ‘curiosity’ connector to his arts practice.
While clerking, the territorial army and trades were his early careers, alongside there was always a passion for creating. A couple of sojourns to Europe and Ireland confirmed it – he photographed everything. “I’d photograph odd things, buildings, and I started looking at the composition of things.”
While living in London with Maelyn, he recalls, “It was fun, we were in the pursuit of ‘strange art’. It was a lifestyle of art, gigs, booze and kebabs – a pretty typical Kiwi London story.”
With encouragement from Maelyn, Bernie attended several art schools successively, and completed his bachelor’s degree in visual art and design at Hawke’s Bay Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) 2001. “I felt it to be a very creative, powerful place and I just let go into the working.”
Where art school frameworks held constriction, Bernie felt inclined towards challenging the status quo, and that is where he found his purpose. “I care about our surroundings, our land, the world we live in. I think we should be kinder to each other, more helpful. As an artist, we have a job to do, to inform people – and it’s not necessarily about nice things.”
Bernie’s works typically contain topical references in keeping with contemporary art notions of ‘the everyday’ – the world we live in, the systems we live by and his response to them.
Together with Maelyn, he makes their ‘bread and butter’ ceramic tiles and badges, which are popular with punters. They are regularly recalibrating the collection for galleries around the country. “We spin off each other really, really well, discussing colour, content and composition. It’s one of our happy places to be.”
These astute pictorial gestures hang intently on any wall or cardi. “I’ve got something to say. I look at the everyday and put precedence on silly things – ‘Buy 2 for 1 today’, ‘Politician buys undies’ – there’s always something in the news. I look at these snippets of human life – the ‘aha’ moments; then it becomes a ceramic tile. Having a laugh, some things around us are so preposterous, we just have to have a laugh with the futility of it all.”
One key to Bernie’s practice is building and expanding themes upon each other. He cites early avant-garde and French surrealists for their automatic drawing and dripping of paint as an influence, and he is committed to diverting from traditional methodology so to produce work experimentally.
This results in a belonging between works, such as with his Cherry on Top (2021) series of paintings followed by his Space Race ceramic object, which won the UKU Clay Hawke’s Bay national ceramics award (2022), held biennially in Hawke’s Bay. The works are quite pretty and consequently bemusing. Paint dripples down in strata on canvas, presenting a hedonistic account of colonialism’s overbearing glamour, whilst clay is stacked, pointed and carved, a pinnacle to the wealth and rhapsody of rockets.
“It’s all very relative – the relationship of themes leading onto the next. There are shadows that need to come out, that have had a peek, but haven’t arrived front and centre yet.”
His recurrent artistic commentary on colonialism and its effects have also drawn attention from viewers. To this he reflects: “A lot of my works are created in the emotion of the moment; my intent is to make works that connect, and always with a bit of humour. I do enough to give a clue, so that people can think about it for themselves.”
Further new directions have found Bernie exploring scaling up his sculpture making, with a black-and-white wood pallet stereo system Music is Life, exhibited at Outfield Festival (2024) and the Westerman’s arcade window, a space curated by artist Michael Hawksworth. This work got people talking – the perfect interactivity Bernie likes to create.
The clay work continues with Bernie making slab-and-coil-built vases, loaded with colour glazes as brilliant as a summer flower garden, and variously subverted – sliced holes, added fingers and general intrusions to what we recognise a vase to be.
“I love playing with clay. I’m resolved in making happy mistakes and thinking, that’s kind of cool, that’s all right. It’s all a conscious process of problem solving on the spot. I’m just being honest.”
He has delved into this material more deeply as the years have gone by. Across his career we see him unafraid to pull and push with the medium. Rash carving, delicate-legged TVs and pianos, imperfections, skulls and wonky pot wurst ware laced with unconventionality are some of the trademarks of Bernie’s ceramic visual language. It is an aesthetic that has grown with clever consistency and consolidation. We recognise his hand, so to speak, and his train of thought is visible to our view. We enjoy it and smile.
