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2010
FEBRUARY 16 - MARCH 13
Janet Mansfield
An anticipated exhibition of exceptional wood fired ceramics by
renowned artist and author.
To make good pots consistently is the greatest challenge.
Sometimes it is possible to fluke a good pot or a fine performance
but to be consistent, that is where experience and temperament play
their part.
I like to experiment: different clays, different types of
firing, and try out new forms that have relevance to me and the
lifestyle of today. The pots in this exhibition have been fired in
three different kilns, a trolley kiln for wood-fired salt-glaze, a
train kiln that is wood-fired and also salted, and an anagama kiln
which relies on the effects of wood ash deposited on the work during
the firing. All these kilns take their time to reach temperature and
the results I seek. One firing can last several days and the high
temperatures reached put the pots at risk of tumbling and
distortion; it is the risk that gives the pots something extra: a
richness and a spirit of independence.
In making numbers of pots, not only for the enjoyment of their
forming or to fill the large kilns, is necessary in finding the
rhythm and discipline of work. In this way, too, one can seek out
the forms that best suit their particular purpose. After a firing
one can sort out those pots that are successful; understanding the
pots and what has happened to them can take more time.
Making pottery is a vocation that takes a lifetime. Making
ceramic art requires all the senses as well as continual thought in
order to make work that is worthwhile – aspects of our vocation we
potters aspire to every day.
Janet Mansfield, December 2009
MARCH 16 – APRIL 10
Pietro Capogreco & Noel Flood
Figurative Art poising an inquiry into contemporary thought, through
the mediums of painting, photography and ceramics.
APRIL 12 – MAY 7
Steve Harrison
Over the 40 years of my career as a potter, I have become interested
in aspects of the real, the tangible, the hand made, a sense of
place, the 'terroir' of a locality. I have no interest in the fast
track and the cheap throwaway. I want real things around me, things
that will stay around me and develop a patina of age and a meaning
born of context and familiarity.
I utilise the ceramic materials that I’ve discovered around me in my
meanderings through my local area. Through investigating my local
geology I have discovered the Joadja bai tunze native porcelain
stone deposit amongst others. This has enabled me to develop my wood
fired porcelain and proto porcelains made from this very special
native bai-tunze porcelain stone. The nature of these porcelain
pieces that I have created is such that they represent me in my
local environment and the geology of the Southern Highlands. They
are not the most translucent or the whitest of porcelains. However,
they are the product of my intellectual interaction with my
locality. During the development of this work it has been my
intention to make a 100% local product. In this regard I have to
admit that I have failed. However, this work is my attempt to
produce a local product. With all its limitations and faults, and
all its local character. The French have a word, ‘terroir’ that
expresses some of this quality. The search for a personal aesthetic
based on the essence of my locality is also the search for the
essence of the potter. The two are inseparable. I like to think that
my use of my found earths, stones and ashes to create individual
pieces is akin to Hogwoods use of period instruments to express
something that is essential and fundamental to his art form.
Globalization has resulted in a situation where we are spoilt by the
availability of excellent materials from all over the world, but at
a terrible cost. I like the recent idea of the 100 km diet, and
likewise I have chosen to limit myself to the 50 km palette. All of
the wood fuel for my kiln was grown on my own land, my neighbours or
from local garden prunings. I made the fire bricks for my kiln by
hand, from a local white bauxite clay which I discovered was useful
for the creation of refractories. My glazes are made from the same
bai-tunze porcelain stone as the clay body or other local igneous
rocks, shales and ashes, all discovered by me and then sorted,
crushed, processed and milled in my workshop. A workshop built by my
partner Janine King and myself from mud bricks that we made from
local clay.
I have taken years of concentrated research to make these bowls,
selecting only the most unique and individual pieces that express my
desire for individuality and otherness. I am surprised that no other
potter that I am aware of is making work with a similar thesis to
this. These pieces are like no other, in that their specific
provenance is known from their source in the soil to their ultimate
exhibition in the Gallery.
No one makes clay like this anymore and I think that it is a shame,
I don’t do it to keep the thing alive - it’s dead. Economics killed
it decades ago. Along with so many other aspects of our ceramic
history, many for the better, most aren’t missed, but a few things
seem worth persevering with and extracting clay by hand just might
be one of them. I don’t even use clay at all anymore in the usual
sense. I’ve slowly made the transition to weathered rock fragments,
because that is a frontier that isn’t currently being thought of, it
isn’t even on the radar, but in amongst those decomposing rock
fragments around where I live, there is the beginnings of clay. On
the surface of each rock granule there is a tiny layer of clay
particles that has been liberated from the dying stone as it
decomposes slowly over the millennia, slowly self-destructing,
turning atom by atom imperceptibly into clay. No one knows that it
is even there, but I do!
I extract the clay for my Blackware body by hand from weathered
basaltic gravel, I work slowly, scraping and selecting as I go, to
get just the right fraction that I’m interested in experimenting
with. This is spread out thinly to dry on the workshop floor and
then roughly crushed to reduce the size of the rock fragments so
that when I stir them vigorously in a bucket of water the clay
particles will be rinsed off the surface of the stones and left
dissolved in the water. I’ve discovered that this is best done by
hand. When a machine is used it breaks up the rock too much creating
something far too glaze-like and not clayey enough. Stirring is
gentle and achieves the purpose exactly, although it is
mind-numbingly slow, it allows time for thought and introspection.
In some of my pots, there is only 15% difference between the clay
body and the glaze, the one material making both clay and glaze. I
have taken to calling my porcelain ‘Australian Bai tunze’. As Bai
tunze is the name that the ancient Chinese potters gave to the
‘porcelain stone’ mineral which they used to produce their native
porcelain and like those early potters I have made pots that have a
slight tendency to warp and even show the odd iron spot. This work
is unique, completely authentic and as beautiful as I am able to
make it.
MAY 11 – MAY 28
The Life of an Artist – Reg Preston in retrospect
JUNE 1 – JUNE 19
Greg Daly
A continual journey of the unknown realm.
2009
FEBRUARY 10 – MARCH 7
Owen Rye
The essence of wood firing is to place good forms in the kiln in
such a position that the firing will add considerable value to them.
My idea of a good form is one that firstly has some intrinsic
interest compared with the millions of ceramic forms I have seen in
my lifetime, aided by an educated intuition, and secondly one that
looks ‘underdone’, like something is missing, with something lacking
somewhere. What is missing is the surface richness from the firing
so that after the firing everything becomes an inseparable whole,
‘resolved’. The resolution of the work has come from studying it in
an abstract kind of way that is very difficult to describe because
it does not involve words. The easy answer is to call the process
intuition but its not really ‘immediate mental apprehension without
reasoning’. It involves a kind of sensory reasoning that takes into
account the strength of a line, the blend of a colour with a form,
the run of ash, the negative space and most important the feeling of
rightness or wrongness in the way it all hangs together. I guess if
your work is abstract (and I think mine has always been about
abstraction, in the sense of not concrete or representational) then
it must be evaluated in the terms of abstraction.
MARCH 10 – MARCH 28
Brian Keyte
Exploration of form and glaze
This exhibition is once again about tightly controlled form and
glaze and their relationship, but with more than a hint of the
independent voices of the clay and the kiln in the overall chorus.
Clay is a plastic almost fluid material in its raw form but a hard,
vitreous one in its finished form. This dual nature is what I hope
to express here. I have managed to loosen the control a little in
the making of the form to allow the clay to show itself and hand
some control to the kiln in the firing.
Whilst my traditional work can speak of the vitreous nature of the
medium, of the bell like ring of a wave rim bowl, of the break of
the copper red on a rim, of a pared back, rhythmic form, the new
work speaks of the plastic, malleable, flowing nature of the clay,
moving to a different rhythm. This is the clay showing that it has
been formed more to its nature and most times, the rhythm of the
potter’s wheel, than to the wants of the human eye. In some cases
even abandoning the wheel entirely to hand build. It can also speak
more plainly of its journey through the kiln. A slight soda
scorching here and there and a movement of glaze and form at the
peak of the fire when the clay is once again plastic and the glaze
fluid. These pieces, informed by tranquil nature and the properties
of the clay were made in a more relaxed mood of contemplation rather
than concentration and this is showing in some of the small bowls,
many of which in some way, I hope are not bought. I rather fancy
taking them home again as I suspect I will not see the likes of some
of them again, as much as I may visit that same place in the making
of others.
All of this is not to say that I have abandoned my roots of the
“engineered” pieces, of the calculated rhythm of a wave formed rim,
of the careful forming of a bowl to a predetermined shape, a
catenary, parabolic or even semi hyperbolic curve. I still enjoy
that. Those forms are here again, and though some may see them as
clinical in their calculated almost industrial aesthetic, they too
are informed by nature as the mathematics behind them is simply the
mathematics that falls out of the natural world when we study it. It
is the mathematics of Bernoulli, Newton, Venturi and countless
others who simply observed nature in fine detail and sought to
explain it in their language of numbers. I have taken these a little
further now, some are more pronounced, a contraction of only one
axis, leading to a more amplified rhythm whilst others have become
more symmetrical, almost a sine wave form. I am studying rim curves
versus bowl curve and finding that there seems to be a relationship.
Certain bowl shapes are better served visually by certain rim
shapes. There may even be a relationship to the tone of the ring of
the piece when flicked with the knuckle.
Some of the glazes too are closer to nature – one or two ingredients
or rocks and allowing the kiln to change the glaze. This means you
will see shino types, long fired and short fired, refired, lightly
reduced and heavily reduced, and even carbon trapping, but the
copper reds and other classics are still there too, slightly changed
to frustrate the glaze pixies, but still of the same spirit.
MARCH 31 – APRIL 18
Barbara Campbell-Allen, Kwi-rak Choung
These two wood-fire artists explore the dynamic possibilities of
form, before function or finish in ravaged sculptural forms and
minimalist vessels.
APRIL 21 – MAY 9
Barry Singleton
At 70 years of age I’ve opened a kiln that has stopped me, or you
could say has gained my attention. I can see the shinos dark and
light, the light ones with the lighter clay body and the thicker
glaze application, and the darker ones glowing like a piece of old
polished leather that are the result of the application of a local
red clay, which is the waste from the gold miners workings over 100
years ago. This I apply as a slip with a thinner shino poured over
the top. It’s very satisfying to take a material from the local
area, prepare it, use it and see the results.
But there’s cause for more excitement as pots in the lower part of
the kiln appear. These pots with the shino glaze have the basic red
and other local white slips underneath and the breadth of variation
becomes evident. The question arises: with the use of local slips
and their blending in combination with the three shinos I’m using,
what variables are possible?
Same kiln same shelf, I’m confronted with a lavender blue glaze
breaking through to a pale classical celadon blue. The pot this
glaze is on is a fullbodied form asking for a sheath of glaze that
will enhance it. This is the glaze this pot needed. These glazes are
the result of testing over a period of 10 years. I have tested small
amounts of oxides and combinations of oxides in a base glaze. The
base glaze itself had a lengthy gestation period.
The glazes were also fired in a variety of reducing atmospheres and
it is satisfying to finally achieve the goal I’ve been seeking for
so long. So given this result, knowledge and materials, how long
will I pursue this path before boredom sets in and the little worm
of curiosity starts to tickle and urges me to ask questions?
Questions such as if I change the balance of the glaze, or introduce
other elements into the glaze – what will the result be? I do know
that it is not in my nature to be bored, for that little worm of
curiosity is rampant in my psyche.
MAY 12 – MAY 30
Tania Rollond, Don Court
Magpie Songs
An exhibition of wheel thrown porcelain that has been hand drawn and
painted with oxides and stains, and wood fired stoneware ceramics.
As I lean over the wheel, magpie songs swell outside and then
flood through the open door. As my pencil searches for a line, the
lightning flash of a rosella cuts across the window. As I take up my
paintbrush, a passing storm stains the sky and stirs the ants - I
take a deep breath as the first swollen drops land.
I shape the forms, draw out the lines and paint the colours that
trace these rhythms on each white surface; patterns of this place
and time.
Tania Rollond, 2009
Clay comes from rocks; some rocks melt and can be used as
glazes. I’ve collected the materials for these works from all around
NSW. It’s the kiln and fire where things become one. Understanding
this process and utilising the fire is where the magic is.
Nature is the inspiration, and I interpret along the way. Light, the
seasons and colour are important, but it seems feelings and
responses are again where the magic is. The magpie sings and I
listen.
Don Court, 2009
JUNE 2 – JUNE 20
Fuping - In Good Company
18 Australian and New Zealand ceramic artists come together in
celebration of their experiences at Fuping, China. In 2006 and 2007
these 18 artists journeyed to Fuping, to create works at the Fuping
Village Ceramic Art Centre, using its clays, glazes, kilns and
technologies. The ceramics produced were then selected for a
permanent collection at the Australasian Museum in Fuping.
The 18 artists in this exhibition are: Janet Deboos, Rowley
Drysdale, Fiona Fell, Steven Goldate, Grant Hodges, Michael Keighery,
Cheryl Lucas, Janet Mansfield, Susie McMeekin, Mark Mitchell,
Chester Nealie, Isaac Patmore, John Parker, Richard Parker, Owen
Rye, Toni Warburton, Chris Weaver, Steve Williams.
View artwork »
JULY 1 – JULY 25
Victor Greenaway
italy with soul :: reflections in figure and form
Victor Greenaway currently resides in Orvieto in Umbria returning to
Australia for several months each year to work in the Lakes Studio
at Nungurner, Victoria.
In Italy he paints the sights and sounds and people of this amazing
architectural landscape as well as producing ceramics (terracotta
and porcelain) in the castle studio at Viceno, conducting workshops
and Master Classes in Europe on invitation as well as at Viceno for
small groups and private clients. As part of the “Discovering Italy”
itineraries he also conducts private, group programmes and, on
request, Master Classes, in ceramics and drawing in Rome, Florence
and Umbria.
Greenaway says: “With constant access to the many major museums
that offer up the most amazing inspirational works, it is possible
to be surrounded by the most wondrous influences on a regular basis.
Especially important for me are the Renaissance paintings by Raphael
with his social references and warm, sometimes challenging, humanity
and the stark confronting reality in the post-Renaissance works of
Caravaggio. Together with the Michelangelo and Bernini marbles,
classical sculptures and architecture: marble columns, stone,
texture, layers of time, these all combine in a great mix of
inspiration in both the paintings and the ceramics. This also
combines with living amidst the art and myths that abound in the
many, many churches and cathedrals that are part of our daily life.”
On ceramics
The new ceramic forms have been influenced greatly by the
traditional shapes that emerged from the Etruscan society 2,500
years ago, especially in the larger, stemmed open bowls or "calice"
and the decorative friezes that chase abstract shapes around the
surfaces. But the surfaces too arise from the smooth surfaces of
marble and classical forms that are everywhere.
In contrast, the Bucchero pieces are made from an Italian volcanic
clay, mostly wheel-turned and polished, then smoke-fumed in a
reduction atmosphere to permeate the black colour through the clay
body which, when polished and fired, has the appearance of
metalware. Bucchero is a distinctively Etruscan product that emerged
around the 7th century BC in Southern Etruria (central Italy).
Regardless of the medium, as in a quick sketch or abstraction, the
outcome relies on experience, intuition and a confidence in
technique. Often the result is uncertain and the work lost or
discarded but the journey is an exciting one and constantly
rewarding.
On painting
Painting has always been a personal and private passion and is a
significant addition to my development as a complete artist. It does
not replace or impede my work as a ceramic artist, on the contrary,
it enhances the creative process by introducing new elements to my
work such as colour and pictorial expression. Inspiration for this
body of work undoubtedly derives from living and working in Italy
over the past number of years. Stimulation comes from everywhere, we
are surrounded by it, living in a medieval hill top town that rises
over Etruscan ruins, with Renaissance overlays, piazzas and palazzi
infiltrating throughout. This close city dwelling means we are
intimately involved in people's lives, customs, traditions and daily
routines and this certainly shows in many of the subjects of the
paintings.
After 2 years of living and working in Italy, Victor Greenaway
returns with an inspirational body of paintings and ceramics that
reflect the people and environment of Italy.
View artwork »
Aug 25 – Sep 12
Delicate Matters
An exhibition celebrating the beauty and delicacy of pierced,
carved, etched and translucent porcelain ceramics.
Artists
include: Julie Shepherd, Cheryl Burgess, Wendy Jagger, Sally Lee,
Kerrie Lightbody and Margaret Beale.
Aug 25 – Sep 12
Chris Major
An Abstract Landscape
Chris Major
Current paintings by Chris Major.
Sept 15 – Oct 3
Stirring
Current ceramics by 9 exceptional early career artists. Award
winning and represented in significant public and private
collections these recently graduated artists are creating excitement
and ‘stir’ in the ceramic art world.
Artists include: Amy Kennedy, Tim Clarkson, Maria Vanhees, Valissa
Butterworth , Tanya Abrahams, Robyn Phelan, Marylyn Walsh, Tatiana
Gvozdetskaia, Amy Cohen and Ruth Andell.
Oct 6 – Oct 24
Phil Elson
'...and over there are the cranes of Sagrada...'
My destination in mid 2008 was the Australia Council studio in
Barcelona. I had been awarded the 3 month residency (Skills and Arts
Development) to find, to hold, to feel the traditional work of the
Basque regions. It does seem to happen that you embark on a
particular journey with a particular destination in mind and
probably some ideas as to what you will see and experience; perhaps
even some idea of what you may bring back with you. The reality
however is that the tides and currents have their way with you…your
imagined experience is utterly different and turns life as you knew
it on its head.
I set out with full intent to do just that
and along the way I travelled to some wondrous places and met some
wonderful people. I met Blanka Gomez de Segura at her pottery in
Ollerias a place about one and a half hours drive south of Bilbao.
She was virtually single handedly keeping alive a tradition that she
informed me was all but extinct. The building that housed her studio
had been built in 1711 and like so many of the potteries of the
region, the skills of the potters had been handed on with each
generation along with a reverence and a love of the pots. However
nearly all the pots and the potteries are gone; the fire of the
kilns extinguished long ago. The potters themselves are gone.
It was at this point in my journey that my original intent and
imaginings were overtaken as I returned to Barcelona where a
completely new horizon opened up to me. Here in this extraordinary
city I was able to visit with ease the work of Picasso, Miro,
Duchamp, Picabia. I was able to walk in the streets as they existed
in Roman times. I stood, overwhelmed, in the stunningly beautiful
buildings of the Modernist designs of Montaner (Palau de la Musica
Catalana), Cadafalch (Casa Amatller) and Gaudi (Casa Batllo, La
Pedrera, Sagrada Familia). I loved how these buildings reached into
the air; into the sky about them. They exuded a love of materials, a
love of place, a love of life. Something of that time, something of
those places now resides in me.
My recent work utilizing high
fired translucent unglazed porcelain is my response to that time in
Barcelona; a response to the love of materials, the love of place,
the love of life.
So are my pots now different? Yes they are
somehow or other. So am I now different? Yes somehow or other. I
feel that I may now have the courage to stride deeper and deeper
into the world.
View artwork »
Oct 27 – Nov 14
Chester Nealie and Jan Irvine Nealie
An exhibition of exemplary woodfired ceramics from one of
Australia’s leading woodfired ceramicist Chester Nealie, and art
textiles by Jan Irvine Nealie inspired by recent trip to China.
Nov 17 – Nov 28
RMIT Ceramic Graduates
An annual exhibition by the RMIT Ceramic Graduates showcasing
creative artistry and individuality.
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