Artists

Scot Willis is an Ōtautahi-based artist–researcher working with the soils, sediments, and coastal materials of Te Waipounamu. His ceramic practice is grounded in curiosity and hands-on experimentation, exploring how local earths behave, break, melt, fuse, and surprise. He’s increasingly drawn to the natural materials around him — gathering, testing, and learning directly from the land.

Willis approaches each vessel as both a functional form and a small investigation into place. His process is playful but attentive: part fieldwork, part technical testing, part “let’s see what happens if…”. Through this mix of attentiveness and openness, he’s developing a practice that treats clay as an active collaborator and positions ceramics as a way of understanding the environments he moves through.