Australian Pottery

This is a large bowl made by Reg Preston (1917-2000) for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games Exhibition. It is glazed a pale brown and decorated on the outside with hand painted and incised aboriginal-like motifs. On the base is incised “P Oct ‘56″.

Also in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics Exhibition were works by Neville Bunning, Mollie Douglas, Dyson Studio Pottery, Ivan Englund, Pamela Hallandal, Harold Hughan, Graham Jones, Eileen Keys, John A. Barnard Knight, Henri Le Grand, Allan Lowe, Marguerite Mahood, Martin Boyd Pottery, Ivan McMeekin, Klytie Pate, Peter Rushforth, Edward Shaw, Dorothy Sutherland and Jeffery Wilkinson (The Arts Festival of the Olympic Games Melburne, 1966, pages 169-71).

This is a fascinating mixture of the old and the new. Allan Lowe, Marguerite Mahood and Klytie Pate, for example, were practicing potters in the pre-war period. Reg Preston, Ivan Englund, Harold Hughan and Peter Rushforth did their training during or just after the war.

The inclusion of two potteries in the exhibition is also interesting. The Martin Boyd Pottery was a company in Sydney operating under that name from 1948-1963. (The connection with the Boyd family was severed in 1950.) Dyson Studio was a semi-commercial pottery operating in Melbourne from 1945-1971.

It seems that the line between art and commerce was often blurred. Jack Knight taught pottery at Royal Melbourne Technical College from 1934-1971 but also produced a commercial line of pottery during the 1950s and 1960s under the name of “Janet Gray”.

Reg Preston started to train as a sculptor in England before the war but switched to pottery on coming back to Australia. He worked at Cooper and Cooke’s Pottery for two years in 1945-46 before taking the plunge to work full-time as a potter. To make a living he produced a range of domestic wares like this slip-decorated coffee mug, as well as larger decorative pieces like the exhibition bowl.

In 1958, Preston and his wife Phil Dunn set up the Potters’ Cottage at Warrandyte, Victoria, with Gus McLaren, Charles Wilton and Artur Halpern. During the 1960s Preston and Dunn produced a line under the name “Ceres”. This coffee pot is an example of the quirky and bravura style developed for the line, possibly with the help of McLaren, who had worked as a cartoonist for the Melbourne Argus.

Artur Halpern also produced a commercial line under the name “Sylha”.

Preston went on to become an acknowledged master. He switched to stoneware in 1967 and worked well into the 1980s, producing often large pieces with rich glazes and bold abstract decoration.

Yesterday’s entry was written so that I could write about this 9 cm (3.5″) bottle with an impressed “LB” insignia on the base. It was posted on eBay earlier this year with a tentative attribution to Les Blakebrough. I am continuing to count it amongst my mystery pots.

Here are the names of the potters I know with the initials LB:

Leigh Bailie, Lyn Baker, Lesley Barnes, Lee Bartley, Leonard Bell, Louise Bennetts, Louise Boscacci, Lorna Boucher, Lisa Boyter, Lorna Brady.

Leigh Bailie, Lyn Baker and Louise Bennetts were students whose work featured in Pottery in Australia in the 1980s. I don’t know whether they went on to become practicing potters. The rest are, or have been, practicing potters in various locations around Australia.

Lesley Barnes, who sold her work at Warrandyte in the 1980s and 1990s, used her full name as an insignia. Leonard Bell, who established a pottery near Bendigo, Victoria, in 1976, used a mark very similar to Les Blakebrough’s “LB” but in conjunction with a “WP” mark for Woodstock Pottery. I don’t have a record yet of the marks used by the other LB potters.

Oh, Oh! A scary thought. What if it doesn’t say LB at all…

Postscript: I am now fairly certain that this is the mark used by the New Zealand potter Lyndsay Bedogni.

Les Blakeborough is one of Australia’s most eminent potters. This carafe, which is missing its stopper, is from the period 1960-1972 when he succeeded Ivan McMeekin as the manager of Sturt Pottery in Mittagong, New South Wales. It has the characteristic impressed LB mark with the letter L raised above and linked to the B and two dots.

The other mark is the Sturt Pottery logo that is still used today on pieces made at the pottery. It consists of a small pick and the Sturt initial. McMeekin, who set up Sturt Pottery in 1953, used a version of this mark with a crossed pick and shovel to indicate the discovery and use of local clays at the pottery.

A similar carafe with stopper (Johnathan Holmes, Les Blakebrough Potter, Sydney: Bay Books, [1989], plate 36) is dated 1962. In both pieces, the handle springs from high on the neck of the pot and joins the rounded body at its centre. Holmes (page 89) says that “the elegance and economy of these works derives from the way in which the handle replicates the curve of the shape of the body”. My piece could be later. The carafe form was part of the workshop repertoire during the 1960s.

I have several other carafes from the Sturt Pottery period. This one has a mark without the two dots. There is a similar piece in a picture of the potter in his workshop from 1962 (Holmes, page 90). This suggests that the mark was in use before Blakebrough’s visit to Japan in 1963.

Blakebrough developed a wide repertoire of forms during his time in Mittagong and employed students to make production pottery to his designs. These pieces were sold under the Sturt Pottery mark. I have seen some pieces attributed to Blakebrough because of their technical competence that just have the Sturt Pottery mark.

In 1973 Blakebrough moved to Tasmania to develop a Ceramics Department at the Tasmanian School of Art. He continued to use the LB mark as on this beautifully made pair of mugs. Early marks from the post-Sturt period still have the two dots.

Blakebrough is still making sublimely executed works using a translucent white porcelain which he developed in the 1990s and calls “Southern Ice”. These are fully signed “Les Blakebrough” or embossed LB.