Denis O'Connor

The Jar Known as PinchMeTight

engraved Welsh roof slate, pigment, 2002

"Adam and Eve and PinchMeTight

went down to the river to bathe

Adam and Eve were drowned

who do you think was saved?"

In 1969 the poet Bob Orr gave me a tiny rimu tree to plant at a place I'd just bought in Putiki Bay, Waiheke Island, NZ. (He worked at a tree nursery then). While gardening around the base of this tree recently ( it towers over my house now) I uncovered most of these shards from the 1970s. Each had a story to tell. As I washed them clean I remembered the 9th century Heian Dynasty pots that I was shown by Koie Ryoji in Tokename, Japan. He had boxes and boxes of them stacked to the ceiling around the house and had been digging them up since childhood. Night after night he decoded the faintest markings on them for me.

'The Jar Known as PinchMeTight' was one of those masterpieces now in the Togei Kenkyu-Sho Museum and often reproduced in the histories. It had a lightening bolt split down one side and a chunk of somthing from a firing catastrophe on its shoulder.

I gave this pot the title ( a tradition in the Orient). I found its name just last year in a collection of poems by James Brown called 'Lemon'. 

When I informed him of this Naming, he sent me his own favourite container. It was another poem, by Wallace Stevens, called 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

Denis O'Connor/ Otto Woo, 28.8.2004

Denis O’Connor: What the Roof Dreamt

City Gallery Wellington

11 August - 4 November 2007

Installation images

This body of work was previously seen at Two Rooms Gallery in Auckland.