Growing up in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole watched her mother, Phoebe Arasepa, digging up earth, forming clumps in her hand, kneading it and feeling for the elasticity that would ensure it would stretch and hold the shapes made by her hands and wooden paddle. As an adult, Gole found the inspiration to develop her own distinctive ways of working with clay.

Combining local handbuilding techniques and her own experimentation with firing, Gole used salt, seaweed, sawdust and leaves to give her unfired pots a dark flashing. Wide-bellied water pots with the facial features and markings of Papua New Guinean women exemplify Gole’s creations. Celebrating the strength and resilience of her countrywomen, her Water storage pots – woman’s face, both 2009 and 2013, speak to the incredible physical labour that village women undertake daily: working in their gardens, carrying heavy loads of root crops and produce, gathering firewood and carting water in large pottery jars, as well as caring for large families.

During the early 2000s, when Gole was recovering from eye surgery, she turned to the creation of small figurines. The first of these was motivated by a newspaper story of intolerance regarding women breastfeeding in public. Incensed by what she considered to be a foreign concept of morality, Gole created her own figurines to honour these women. She has since sculpted figures of men in warrior dress, reflecting on the loss of tradition that once defined the conduct of her country’s young men.