Australian Pottery

This handsome and austere salt glazed piece is a footed disc flattened on both sides and carved with a whorl pattern. It is 18cm (7″) tall. It does have a mark but I cannot decipher it. It resembles the work of the British potter Hans Coper (1920-1981) in its surface treatment and in the way it has been thrown, altered and assembled. Coper and his colleague Lucy Rie (1902-1995) influenced a number of Australian potters who travelled to England in the 1960s and 1970s.

I am not certain that this piece is Australian, only that it has an Australian provenance. I could say this about many of my mystery pots. This is one of the issues with collecting studio pottery. Australian collectors buy pieces by overseas potters and overseas potters visit or exhibit in Australia. The Adelaide auction house Scammells recently auctioned a collection of Danish studio pottery. Some of these pieces could well turn up in a few years’ time as mystery pots!

This is a small unsigned decorative tile made by Peter Travis for a feature wall in the shop of François Jermani in Australia Square in Sydney, now demolished. It is the only Peter Travis piece I own and I paid quite a lot for it. His work is hard to come by and realises high prices. A wonderful piece dated 1971 sold for $4,800 at a recent Shapiro auction.

Even in the early 1970s Travis was not a potter everyone could afford:

“My work is highly-priced. For two reasons - there is a demand for it and even at these high prices I still can’t make enough from the project to suport myself. Maybe that will come. The low final output makes my work even more valuable” (Nine Artist Potters, p. 25).

Together with potters like Marea Gazzard and Alexander Leckie, Travis is often classed as an artist-potter or sculptor. There is no question of his pieces being functional or non-functional. They are art objects - large slab and coil built forms in organic shapes that use clay as a form of artistic expression.

One of Gazzard’s works from the early 1970s also illustrated in Shapiro’s Past Highlights page sold for over $15,000. A small terracotta boulder from the 1960s was listed on eBay last week for just 99 cents. It will be interesting to see what final price it fetches.

eBay is firming up as a marketplace for high-priced items. The much lower premiums are born by the seller so the closing price is what the buyer pays, not counting delivery costs. There are greater risks: to the buyer in terms of not knowing the seller and not being able to view the item; and to the seller in terms of attracting the right buyers at the right time. Provenance is generally not an issue. Auction houses often don’t publish the provenance of a piece. eBay sellers often do, in order to secure the trust of potential buyers.

In the fortieth anniversary issue of Pottery in Australia (Vol. 40, #3, 2001) there is a series of articles on the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s that surveys major trends in Australian pottery since 1962, when the journal was first published. These are available online. The author is Karen Weiss, a Sydney writer and potter.

A small book simply called Pottery by Janet Mansfield (Sydney : Fontana/Collins, 1986) gives a really interesting overview of what it was like to make a living as a potter in the mid 1980s through interviews with a number of practising potters.

Janet Mansfield is one of Australia’s master potters. She edited Pottery in Australia from 1976-1990 and now edits Ceramics: Art and Perception. This is an international journal and, like Craft Arts International, which is also published in Australia, reflects the surprising prominence Australia plays as a producer of arts and crafts in the global arena.

In 2004 the Melbourne gallery Skepsi on Swanston held an exhibition called Celebrating the Master. The published exhibition catalogue shows a good selection of the work of “renowned Australian ceramists” and also publishes a picture of their marks.

This beautifully made serving bowl with its finely speckled leopard skin glaze, and blaze of red colour has a quite legible signature - R? Macready. It was listed on eBay in March 2005. The glaze is characteristic of the potter’s work going by two similar pieces that have been listed on eBay since then, a teapot and a casserole dish. These have a full signature (see marks 2 and 3 below) but the first name is hard to decipher - Ruby? Ridge? - I’m not sure. I am guessing that this piece dates from the 1990s.

There are thousands of Australian contemporary potters and no single definitive reference work. The best place to find books on Australian pottery in general or on specific potters is Libraries Australia. Only the masters have books written about them. Information about other potters has to be gleaned from directories, exhibition and auction catalogues and book and journal indexes.

Over time the Potters’ Society of Australia has issued a number of directories of its members. These contain short biographies of the potter and, in many cases, an illustration of the potter’s mark. The society (now the Ceramics Association of Australia) stopped publishing printed directories a few years ago and now maintains an online Australian Ceramics Directory.

Many potters are not represented in the published directories. If you have a name it is always worth trying an Internet search. Some potters and potteries have a web presence - a personal website, a CV on a gallery website, a listing in eBay or another trading post or an entry in a state association or local society, business directory or travel guide. I maintain a set of bookmarks to Australian pottery websites on del.icio.us and this is growing into a useful resource for potters with a current or archived web presence. Some of this information can be quite ephemeral, however, and many potters and potteries are invisible on the Internet.

The good news is that things are improving daily. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography is now available online, for example, and this has given the Canberra potter Henri Le Grand a persistent web presence. Another emerging resource is the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online. The Powerhouse Museum has also seeded search engines with some of its records. A Google search on Reg Preston now retrieves a list of 28 items in the Museum’s collection. A number of the key journals are also publishing their indexes online, or even whole articles.

If you are really interested in Australian contemporary pottery, it is worth trying for a complete set of Pottery in Australia (now the Journal of Australian Ceramics). Back issues are regularly offered for sale through secondhand dealers. Other key journals include Ceramics: Art and Perception, Craft Australia and Craft Arts International.

Volume 29, number 2 (1990) of Pottery in Australia is a special index edition which indexes all of the issues back to the first volume in 1962. The website also has an online index for the years 2000 to date and the publishers are working on the gap years. The online index is an author/title index with short abstracts, whereas the 1990 index is more complete, listing most of the names mentioned in articles.

Art and craft journals are also indexed in services like Austart (1987 to date) and APAIS (1978 to date online but printed indexes go back to 1945). Factiva indexes Australian newspapers and Australian Art Sales Digest and Australian Art Auction Records list the prices fetched for auctioned works, although not for work changing hands through online auctions. Austart is free. The others are subscription services but you may have access through your library.

Online auction sites are also a useful source of information. Listings do not stay around for long but can provide details about an item or its provenance and pictures of potters’ marks. Australian contemporary pottery is generally listed under the Australian Pottery category on eBay, mixed up with pieces from the earlier period. Make sure you go to the Australian eBay (http://www.ebay.com.au) not the international one. OZtion, an Australian auction site, also has an Australian Pottery category.