What\u2019s it like to quit your career post-50? Kim Knight talks to Phil Brooks, the interior designer who became an award-winning ceramicist.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo not use,\u201d says the note taped to the oven.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a precaution against electrical overloading. For the next 12 hours, the pottery kiln takes priority.<\/p>\n
\n What\u2019s inside
\n the kiln?\n <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s either going to be beautiful, a disaster, or a beautiful disaster,\u201d says Phil Brooks. \u201cThe last would be the best.\u201d<\/p>\n
Life as a series of happy accidents?<\/p>\n
Not really. Brooks was 53 years old when she made the very deliberate decision to leave a long career as an interior designer and retrain as a potter.<\/p>\n
A decade later, and she\u2019s standing down the back of a room wondering if she\u2019s really just heard her name being announced.<\/p>\n
Brooks was, in her own words, \u201cknackered\u201d. She didn\u2019t want to go out that night; husband Chris had to convince her the opening of the Ceramics NZ 61st National Exhibition might be fun.<\/p>\n
And now she was being called to collect the Premier Award.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was lovely. Really, really lovely, actually. Because I\u2019d never won anything before. But in terms of it being validation? I shouldn\u2019t say this, because I\u2019ll never get a prize ever again …<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s wonderful for the moment. Telling people about it and sticking the certificate up on the fridge. But what was important was that it led to the next lot of work \u2013 feeling some confidence that there was a positive reaction, not just to the pot, but to the idea of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The winning work was called Coddle. The idea was \u201ca child yet to find its feet\u201d. It was a pot that needed another pot for support.<\/p>\n
Potter Phil Brooks shares a studio with Stuart the dog. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
The collection that came out of that piece is called Fledge \u2013 16 pieces sitting on her West Auckland work bench, waiting to be bubble wrapped and shipped to Milford Galleries Queenstown, for a solo show that runs from July 18 to August 17.<\/p>\n
When Brooks is feeling flash, she calls herself a ceramicist. A more accurate description, she thinks, might be \u201cart potter\u201d.<\/p>\n
These are not salad bowls or vases \u2013 even if their shape sometimes suggests functionality.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are recognisable. Hopefully nice shapes, welcoming shapes. The art side of it is what I then do with that shape. How I interact, intervene and alter it to make it more than just a vessel or a surface to decorate … it becomes inhabited, saying something about space and enclosure or freedom or all sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks, 63, graduated from London\u2019s Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1992. As an interior designer, she lived and worked in Singapore for several years. In New Zealand, she worked for Jasmax on projects as diverse as the retail shop for Te Papa and the refurbishment of Auckland\u2019s Town Hall and Civic Theatre (she\u2019s particularly proud of the huge, swagged and tasselled velvet curtains designed for the latter).<\/p>\n
Ten years ago, she signed up for an Otago Polytechnic Diploma in Ceramic Arts and Design distance learning course delivered at Auckland Studio Potters.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking something three-dimensional with your hands \u2013 seeing it right through, the glazing and the firing and having those magic moments of transformation out of the kiln. There\u2019s nothing like it, really, for someone who had been drawing everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took pride in it, I love drawing, but the act of just producing the drawing wasn\u2019t enough …\u201d<\/p>\n
Coddle, the pot-within-a-pot work by Auckland-based ceramicist Phil Brooks that took the premier award at the 2025 Ceramics NZ National Exhibition.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s it like to navigate a midlife career change?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou stop one job, and you do something else, and people say \u2018you\u2019re brave to have changed\u2019. But it\u2019s not that at all. It\u2019s just a continuation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sounds pretentious, but it\u2019s just about finally feeling good about where you\u2019ve got to and knowing it\u2019s the right place.\u201d<\/p>\n
A huge caveat: \u201cI\u2019m lucky I could do that \u2013 I have a husband who kept working. It\u2019s a privilege. Sometimes you cannot make the choice. Your life is just too hard to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks\u2019 mother was born in China. Her maternal grandparents met on their wedding day, a woman from a wealthy family matched with a well-educated man. They had 10 children \u2013 only six surviving into adulthood. Ultimately, her mother ended up in Canada, where she met Brooks\u2019 father, an Englishman working as a graphic artist for an advertising agency.<\/p>\n
For the past 30 years, Brooks has lived in the West Auckland home she designed. But in the first half of her life, she counted more than 20 houses in six different countries. Born in England, she started school in Milan and added French to her Italian when her father thought his next job was in Belgium.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then Dad got sent to Malaysia …\u201d<\/p>\n
He was a creative director with Ogilvy & Mather, too left of centre to really enjoy the expat lifestyle, says Brooks, \u201cbut Mum was in her element! Maid, gardener, driver and speaking her own language for once. Though we were sort of at the bottom of the ladder. Kids would come round and say, \u2018You\u2019ve only got one servant \u2013 is this possible? You haven\u2019t got a swimming pool \u2013 is this possible?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks was preparing to join her older sister Jacqui at high school in Britain when the family moved again. Malaysia wanted its own people in managerial roles; her dad was offered a transfer to Adelaide or Wellington.<\/p>\n
\u201cAugust 1975, we touched down at Wellington airport. The windiest day you could ever imagine. My mother \u2013 who was great most of the time \u2013 was horrified …\u201d<\/p>\n
She pauses. \u201cDo you need all this detail?\u201d<\/p>\n
No. And yes. Brooks answers her own question when she says: \u201cThe trajectory of a life, and all the things, they\u2019re not even chapters, they just all kind of blend together. It\u2019s important not to look at experiences as being bad or good, because they\u2019re all, in a way, good. They\u2019re all meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Accept that, she says, \u201cand you\u2019ve got more of a chance of getting to that place where you feel like you really belong\u201d.<\/p>\n
She was bullied at her first Wellington high school, enjoyed her second one, but saw her seventh form out in Auckland when the family shifted (again). Her parents separated. A boyfriend drowned at Anawhata. She does not go into detail but says, simply, \u201cIt was really, really difficult\u201d.<\/p>\n
Heading to London to study architecture was something tangible. \u201cOne of those things you think really saved you at the time, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe AA\u201d was infamously conceptual in its focus. She recalls a class trip to Liverpool port in the mid-1980s to look at derelict grain silos.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe project was to design a tango dancehall \u2013 in this incredible void, on top of these silos.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today: \u201cMy work, I hope, is a lot about space and not only about surface.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phil Brooks (and Kipper the cat) in the house she designed and now works from after a mid-life career switch to pottery. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
Brooks called her first exhibition \u201cpots I couldn\u2019t draw\u201d. Her fork in the career road reaction to decades spent designing things other people physically brought to life.<\/p>\n
She builds her pots from coils of clay, scraping, cutting and smoothing in a studio shared with Stuart the dog, to a soundtrack delivered by an Auckland Libraries BorrowBox audio book subscription (her playlist is heavy on \u201cgentle British detective writers\u201d).<\/p>\n
Husband Chris is a jazz musician and music teacher, and they\u2019ve been married 26-and-a-half years.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe invited me to an album launch, but he didn\u2019t think it through. He didn\u2019t realise that he\u2019d be on stage and he wouldn\u2019t be able to talk to me. So, yeah, I met someone else there. But he persevered!\u201d<\/p>\n
He hired her to design a house he never lived in and they honeymooned in Samoa with the $2000 he paid for the plans. In 2001, after a series of miscarriages, they began working through Child Youth and Family services to adopt a baby from southern China.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of my heritage, and my Mum was still alive at the time, it seemed like a really positive thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks describes becoming parents to Sasha in 2005 as \u201cmagical and difficult at the same time\u201d. There is a sense that phrase might capture more than just the early years. Now?<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s studying, doing really, really well, and she\u2019s been living away from home for a few years. We are incredibly proud of her \u2013 and I think she quite likes us!\u201d<\/p>\n
Ceramicist Phil Brooks builds her pots with layers of coiled clay. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
Fledge, the show that\u2019s heading to Queenstown, is about growth and support.<\/p>\n
\u201cA mother or father bird, the protection of a nest. Letting the bird in and out, becoming freer over time. At one point it leaves altogether, but there\u2019s a range of time when it keeps coming back and being fed and supported and nourished and taught how to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Too easy. It\u2019s about her only child leaving home?<\/p>\n
The artist is her own muse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the whole story, isn\u2019t it? I\u2019ve got to this point because of everything I\u2019ve been and seen and made and cried about. So it has to be me. But it\u2019s also important that it\u2019s still got a sense of humour \u2013 that it doesn\u2019t always take itself too seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fledge by Phil Brooks shows at Milford Galleries Queenstown from July 18 to August 17.<\/p>\n
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