Australian Pottery

This pair of earthenware lidded containers with slip-trailed decoration was made by the Victorian potter Kevin Boyd. In June 1989 he exhibited a series of “faintly Islamic” whimsical ‘blush’ pots that sound very similar although not illustrated in the exhibition review (Helen Young, “Precious little - Victorian Ceramic Group”, Pottery in Australia, 28(4), Dec 1989, p.64).

Boyd’s entry in Potters Online tells us that he is currently based in Surrey Hills, Melbourne. He graduated from the Bendigo College of Advanced Education with a Diploma of Art (Ceramics) in 1977 (Missing Alumni: Bendigo Campus 1977-1979) and has been teaching and making pottery for thirty-two years.

In recent years he has been exploring Raku Nu. This is a technique that uses slip as a separating layer between the burnished bisque-fired pot and the raku glaze. The glaze cracks on firing and the cracks are coloured by smoke in a reduction chamber. The slip is then scraped away, leaving a naked black and white surface. He exhibited a number of large pieces in this style at the pottery expo at Gapstead in 2006.

Boyd inscribes his work ‘Kevin Boyd’ and also uses an impressed stamp with his full name and a five petal flower motif on functional ware. Novice eBay sellers sometimes mistake him for a member of the famous Boyd family but I am not aware of any connection.

This large, deep-bodied, stoneware bowl with reduced iron glaze and wax resist decoration has an impressed stamp in the form of a tricuspid. I have seen three pots now on eBay with this mark. From their style and provenance (the sellers are all based in Melbourne) they are likely to be the work of a potter active in Victoria in the 1970s and 1980s. Pots do travel but potters tend to exhibit and sell their work in their own state and sellers to source their listings locally.

Marks in the form of symbols can be hard to describe and I ended up using IP Australia’s Glossary of image descriptors to find a name for this one. The glossary is available as a PDF file about halfway down the Trademarks page on the IP Australia website. Just below this link is another useful tool that lets you find out how common a surname is in Australia. I’ve used this several times to infer the correct spelling of an inscribed name.

Potters’ marks are an important way - often the only way - of identifying a potter’s work. I doubt that many potters register their marks. I wonder how they go about choosing one and whether they are aware of other similar marks in use?

This porcelain tea bowl with finely painted and textured surfaces and attenuated rim was made by the Queensland potter Shannon Garson. Her mark is a painted heart with wings. She trained as a painter and takes a painterly approach to her thrown vessels using simple forms that are meant to be used. A few weeks ago, Garson mentioned my blog in her blog, Strange Fragments. By coincidence I had already been thinking about making her the subject of an entry.

We first noticed Garson’s work at Beaver Galleries several years ago. Our first purchase was a tiny buttery-yellow bowl, then we added the tea bowl to our collection and lastly this salad bowl dated 2004 with raised anemones on a copper green background. A lot of potters work in porcelain now because of its whiteness, smoothness and translucency. Garson’s work stood out for us because of the nuanced surfaces, botanical references and delicacy of colour and line. (For more on her method of working see her website.) Garson’s pieces are also affordable at a time when some potters are pricing their work for an elite market.

This is a white earthenware, salt-glazed oil bottle with a classic shape enhanced by a row of beading where the neck starts to narrow. The mark shown here is from a sugar bowl that we have by the same maker. It looks like “OB” or “OMB” between two circular disks connected by a rod. This bottle is similar to work produced by Bendigo Pottery in the 1970s but I’ve only seen two pieces with this mark.

Bendigo Pottery is Australia’s oldest working pottery. It started operation in 1857 and is now a heritage tourist attraction with its own website. An article in Australian Decorative Pottery of the 1930s gives a good outline of its early history but does not cover the period from 1968 onwards when the production of salt-glazed Epsom ware was revived by Bill Derham (Peter Laycock, “Epsomware: A history of Bendigo Potteries Ltd,” Pottery in Australia, 9(1), 1970, 17-20).

We don’t collect Bendigo Pottery because there is so much of it around and it would engage our entire attention. However, we do have a small side interest in collecting representative pieces by individual throwers. This is made easy because, from 1970-1987, each thrower added his initials to the centre of the Bendigo Pottery Epsom stamp (Ford, p. 30). The large jug illustrated here was made by Allan Letts, who worked at the pottery from 1940-1974. (He went on to set up the Cannie Ridge Pottery in Harcourt in 1976). AG is Alex Gill. IP is Ian Preston. KT is Ken Tresize. WA. is William Akkermans. We have also seen AD, AI, GI, GL, HD, JG, JM, KC, KG, MC, NB, PB, PD and RG but I don’t know yet who these potters are.

I would really like to find out more about “OB” or “OMB” and if there is any relationship between the maker of this oil bottle and Bendigo Pottery.

Postscript

I now realise that this is one of the marks used by the Old Ballarat Pottery. The device is a mine headframe and the “M” is part of the structure.

Despite the quite large numbers of pieces from this pottery that are listed on eBay, I’m finding it surprisingly hard to find anything about it. I do know that it was a registered company from 1984-1994 located at 5 Elsworth Street and that it produced work in an old- fashioned style for the tourist market. A historical extract from the Australian Securities Commission shows that the Ballarat potter and educator John Gilbert was an officer of the company in its first years of operation. Some of its products were sold through a company called Faberware.

I don’t think that it had any formal association with Sovereign Hill, Ballarat’s gold mining activity park. The Edinburgh Pottery, which produces similar work, was opened there in 1972 and is still in operation.

In 1861, George Marks established a pottery on Creswick Road in Ballarat, near the Old Cemetery. There with the help of four boys he produced salt-glazed drain pipes, chimney pots and tiles for Ballarat builders as well as a quantity of wheel-thrown jars, flower pots and saucers, water monkeys, bread pans, butter pots, ginger beer bottles, etc. (Ballarat Star, August 16, 1870).

In 1878, Marks established a second pottery in Adelaide, leaving the running of the Ballarat Pottery mostly to his new partner Samuel Coyte. Within a few years the pottery ceased to produce domestic wares although it continued making pipes and fittings until 1928, when it was taken over by Martin Stoneware Pipe Ltd (Geoff Ford, Australian Pottery: The First 100 Years, 1995, p. 242).

All but one chimney of the factory and kilns were demolished in the 1960s, with the bricks being used to construct the Old Ballarat Village opposite Sovereign Hill (Ballarat Heritage Precincts Study. Part A. Volume 4. Creswick Rd & Macarthur St Heritage Precinct, 2006, page 10). Ford says that no domestic pottery has been found with a Ballarat Pottery stamp, which may mean that no stamp was used. So, as far as I can see, there is no relationship between the two potteries except by allusion.