MAIA KREISLER

Born in 1983 in Ngāmotu and of Ngāti Mutunga and Te Āti Awa descent, Kreisler lives and works in Naarm Melbourne, where she has developed a sculptural language grounded in hand-built ceramics, pit firing, carved surfaces, and material processes that hold cultural and ancestral resonance. Kreisler is best known for ceramic works that move between vessel, figure, and symbolic form, and for a wider practice that also encompasses writing and curatorial work, including roles with the Koorie Heritage Trust and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre.

Early Life

Kreisler holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts at Massey University in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and a Diploma of Māori Art and Design from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, where she studied under the master uku artist Wī Taepa. This combination of academic and customary training is important to her development, giving her a practice that is formally experimental while remaining grounded in intergenerational transmission and tikanga Māori.

Works and Methods

Kreisler works primarily with uku, hand-building ceramic sculptures through coiling, slab construction, pinching, carving, and pit-firing. Her works frequently resemble vessels, pods, seed forms, or abstracted bodies, and they often balance heaviness with tenderness through rounded profiles, incised surfaces, and carefully modulated skins. Smoke, iron oxide, manganese dioxide, silver paint, and dark glazes contribute to a surface language that can appear scorched, weathered, or mineral-rich, making each object feel as though it has been unearthed as much as made.

Recent works indicate a sustained interest in repetition and constellation. Pieces such as Hāpai I (2021), Kōwhaiwhai III (2020), and Punga Cove (2023) suggest how Kreisler uses naming to connect individual works to states of holding, adornment, place, and inherited pattern. Her 2025 exhibition Ka Mua, Ka Muri – Walking Backwards Into the Future at Craft Victoria brought together a new collection of ceramic sculptures arranged as a relational field rather than a series of isolated objects, emphasising kinship, cyclical time, and the presence of tūpuna within contemporary life. In these works, vessel forms become carriers of mauri and memory, while kōwhaiwhai and other Māori visual languages are adapted into sculptural, tactile terms.

Themes and Context

Kreisler’s work explores the human condition through a Māori worldview, with particular attention to whakapapa, manaakitanga, grief, resilience, and the reciprocal relationship between bodies and environments. Her ceramics are not simply formal exercises in shape and texture; they are often structured around ideas of care, continuation, and the ways ancestral knowledge can persist through material practice. The proverb invoked in Ka Mua, Ka Muri – Walking Backwards Into the Future is especially revealing, framing time not as linear progress but as a movement guided by the visible

Within contemporary Indigenous art, Kreisler’s practice sits alongside renewed attention to clay as a medium of both cultural continuity and speculative form. Her study under Wī Taepa places her within a significant genealogy of Māori ceramics, yet her work is distinctly her own in the way it brings together esoteric symbolism, bodily intimacy, and a sensitivity to collapse, shelter, and endurance. Living and working on Boonwurrung Country in Naarm also sharpens the trans-Tasman dimension of her practice, where Māori identity is carried, adapted, and rearticulated in relation to another Indigenous land and community.

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Ocula | 2026