Known potter #10: Derek Smith

This 15 cm high vessel with front opening has been made by combining two half circles. It may have been intended for use as a salt pig. If so, it is certainly the nicest salt pig I have ever seen. The unglazed white stoneware clay has been incised in horizontal rings on the outside and stained with oxides. The precision of the spherical form makes it recognisable as the work of Derek Smith. The Blackfriars Pottery ‘BP’ impressed seal on the top dates it to the period 1977-1983 as does the stamp on the side.

Smith trained as a ceramic designer and art teacher in England and worked in pottery studios and the ceramic industry before coming to Australia in 1956. Over the next sixteen years he taught at art schools in Hobart and Sydney as well as setting up his own kilns and studios at Bowral, NSW (1958-1962), Hobart (1962-1964) and Beecroft, NSW (1965-1972). Then in 1973 he was invited to establish and manage a pottery studio within the Doulton Australia factory at Chatswood, NSW.

This small jug stamped ‘Doulton Studio Australia’ is quite different from other outputs of the factory such as the jug on the right from the Grecian key range. In an article in Pottery in Australia (Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 1974, pp. 4-9) Smith describes how this new venture came about, defends his use of the jolley machine and moulds to increase efficiency and speaks about his ideas for future development of the studio.

Peter Rushforth, reviewing an exhibition of the studio’s work in 1975, saw Smith’s training as a designer equipping him to take on this challenge (Pottery in Australia, Vol. 14, No. 2, Spring 1975, p. 61). Potters with a more romantic approach to throwing as part of the creative process might have found it harder to establish a studio in an industrial plant.

For whatever reason, Smith did not stay long at Doulton. He left in 1976 to set up the Blackfriars Pottery in Chippendale, an inner Sydney suburb. The Powerhouse Museum, which purchased four discoid forms in 1976 observed that Blackfriars had became the largest of its kind in Australia. From this I am assuming that he took some of his production methods with him to the new pottery. Certainly many of the works now coming up for auction by Derek Smith are from this period.

In 1984 he moved back to Tasmania and set up a studio at ‘Oakwood’ Mangalore. Here he kept a lower profile, emerging from time to time with a new collection of pieces for exhibition. We bought this spherical box from a gallery in Battery Point, Hobart, in the early 1990s. It has the impressed DS mark used for work from this period.

In 2001, Despard Gallery took a selection of his work to the SOFA exposition in Chicago. Subsequently, Smith spent four years living and working in Italy. He was back in Tasmania by 2006 when he held an exhibition at the Handmark Gallery in Hobart. Both of these exhibitions showcased his increasing use of rich burnished colours and metallic glazes.

By contrast, this small semi-cylindrical wall piece with iron-grey textured decoration which we bought from the Handmark Gallery earlier this year shows a return to a muted palette and textured surface.

A definitive book has yet to be published on Smith. Hood and Garnsey (Australian Pottery, pp. 152-153 and plates 114-120) assess his work up until 1972, finding his textured surfaces “a necessary foil to the severity of his forms”. Nine Artist Potters, (Littlemore and Carlstrom, 1973, pp. 90-105) includes an interesting potter’s statement. Janet Mansfield (A Collector’s Guide to Modern Australian Ceramics, 1988, pp. 21-23) classes his work with that of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Les Blakebrough, Victor Greenaway, Mansfield herself, Greg Daly, Joan Campbell and Owen Rye as genuine examples of the potter’s art.

His work is fairly easy to identify from the style and/or marks. Geoff Ford (Encyclopedia of Australian Potters’ Marks, pp. 203-204) lists the eleven marks that Smith has used over the years. These mostly consist of his name or initials in various forms. The ones to watch out for are a T in a circle from his early years in Tasmania and this one, which he used at Beecroft, usually but not always with a ‘Derek Smith Studio’ seal.

Postscript: Christine Ball

Christine Ball has let me know that the cb mark illustrated above and in Ford’s book is hers. Ball was born in Sydney in 1952. After studying at Seaforth Technical College in 1971, and East Sydney Technical College in 1972-1973, she worked for Derek Smith in his Beecroft Studio in 1974. She recalls that Smith encouraged her to make some one-off pieces using her mark with the Beecroft seal. I’ve also seen other pieces that just have the ‘cb’ mark so she must have continued to use it in her independent work.

Ball set up her own pottery at Wheeler Heights in Sydney in 1975 through a workshop grant from the Australia Council. She moved the workshop to Myoora Road, Terrey Hills in Sydney in 1978 and started using the Myoora Pottery stamp for production work. I am not sure when she started using the upper case impressed ‘CB’ mark illustrated here, but I have seen it in association with the Myoora Pottery stamp.

In 1981, she moved again to to Uralla, NSW, where she opened the Myoora Pottery Craft Shop (renamed to Barking Dog Gallery in 1998). She is still working as a potter, experimenting with different clays, glazes and techniques. Her current mark (photo courtesy of the potter) is this variant of the upper case ‘CB’.