Annie McIver

Annie McIver is a New Zealand ceramic artist whose hand-built figurative sculptures explore memory, identity, and the fragile seams between the inner and outer self. Annie constructs her pieces using coil and slab techniques, building in a modular way that allows each form to evolve intuitively.

A graduate of Unitec with a Master of Design (2012), Annie’s practice is shaped by recurring motifs of childhood, dreams, and the collective unconscious. “Everything I make tends to hark back to childhood and to the collective unconscious,” she explains. “I make what I feel like making and sort out why later. It’s an attempt to integrate the internal me with the outside world.”

This dialogue between interior and exterior worlds runs through all of Annie’s work. Her figures often appear caught in moments of stillness or quiet revelation — as if stepping from a dream or pausing within a story whose ending we cannot see. Animals, symbolic objects, and tender gestures act as companions or clues to a deeper emotional state, inviting the viewer to recognise something of their own inner landscape. Beneath these scenes lies a sense of waiting, reflection, and searching for meaning reminiscent of the existential undercurrents in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a text that continues to influence Annie’s work.

Annie often returns to the sensation of floating, a recurring childhood dream. “Placing falling and floating figures in the same plane provokes a visual disjunct,” she writes. “We float in water and fall from the sky unless we see it in a dream.” Works including Be Still My Beating Heart, Traversing the Scarred Heart, and Parameters of the Heart confront themes of anxiety, mortality, and the passage of time with poetic intensity and psychological depth.

Annie’s ceramic practice has been recognised nationally, with Annie’s work frequently selected as a finalist in the prestigious Portage Ceramic Awards — New Zealand’s leading annual celebration of contemporary ceramics.

Annie’s sculptures, at once enchanting and contemplative, invite viewers to inhabit a space between the seen world and the unconscious self.