Kiya creates new rivers of steel
Sandra Chesterman – Gulf News, 25 March 2021

(Reproduced with permission of the author.)

Although a career in the arts was something she’d wanted from a young age, it would not be until 2004 that sculptor and ceramicist Kiya Nancarrow would set up her own art practice. Returning from London where she worked as an Occupational Therapist and Psychotherapist while also completing a BA in Ceramics at the University of Westminster, she was unable to find employment in mental health work here. It was a rejection which she now sees as a gift. “I’d never have risked it,” she says. “I never thought you could possibly live by making artwork.” Waiheke was a choice right from the start also. “I thought where do you go after London? You feel liberated in a big city like that but then you come to a place like this and you can be who you really are and do what you want.”

The swirling dynamic forms of her work are immediately recognisable. Each piece is unique but the underpinning intention of capturing “a sense of movement and continuous energy” has been the force behind her art for the past 20 years. “I got really interested in Buddhism when I was travelling in India and trained as a Buddhist psychotherapist. I was intrigued by their completely different outlook on the world and the whole theme of a continuum. They have a theory that everything is interconnected and that there’s an energy that we don’t see but it’s through us and through all objects. I got hooked, and I can’t seem to let it go – it doesn’t feel like it’s finished.”

She is constantly refining her work. Initially working in clay, recently she has extended her practice into corten steel. It was a move in part to manage transporting her work around the country – ceramic pieces often being damaged in transit; but also driven by her desire to work on a much larger scale. “A friend designed a purpose-built steel press and a local engineer built it out of scrap metal. It was great because they understood what I was trying to say so they built it to do what I wanted. It’s my baby and I love it but now I want to go bigger still. Now the limitation is me. I’ve got to a point where I want to be but now I haven’t got the muscle – it’s so frustrating. One of the engineers said, “you have to figure it out, Kiya.” So I had to get cunning with tools and things to help with the weight and the lifting.” Now she has a huge 300 ton-capacity jack with a pump, “totally unnecessary – I could lift my whole house if I wanted to, but it works really well.”

Her painted steel works are first galvanised. Great care is needed to avoid the zinc coating pooling on surfaces which need to be totally slick prior to powder coating. Others, like “Yield”, created for the recent SculptOneroa are left to weather.

“Corten steel will not be quiet,” she says. “whatever you do it comes through – it’s as though it’s alive. It does its whole oxidising thing for at least two months and then it seals. That characteristic was created by the shipping world which added copper to the normal steel-making process for shipping containers. Once it seals itself, that’s it – it doesn’t rust any more.”