Known potter $30: Jack Jackman

The road from Canberra across the treeless Monaro Plains  and down Brown Mountain opens into a green valley edged with blue mountains and dotted with black and white cows.  This winter has been so dry that the paddocks were as brown as we had seen them until a few weeks ago, when the weather finally broke. Our umbrella, which I placed in this vase as one of my first actions on moving into our new house, had spent the entire winter there, and we were very pleased to have to use it on our weekly shopping trip to Bega.

The vase, at 48 cm high, makes an excellent umbrella stand.  It is glazed in graduated earth and sky colours with deeply scored tree-of-life decoration. The base is incised  ‘J Jackman’ but we knew nothing else about the maker when we acquired it, and could only attribute it to ‘unknown’  (umbrella not included) when we opened the gallery.

A fellow collector has just got in touch to let us know that our umbrella stand was made by the Geelong potter Alfred John Jackman (1911-2006).  He says:

Alfred John Jackman affectionately known as Jack was a Bombadier navigator in world war 2 and a primary school teacher who died in 2006 at the age of 95. He came to Geelong from Melbourne in 1957 and taught at Norlane and Corio South primary schools.  When his son Bill began making pottery in 1962 Jack joined in and according to Bill “took to it like a duck to water”.

He loved to experiment with all types of glazes, once even adding chick peas for that special effect . The peas would explode under the heat (but stink the house out). He enjoyed adding to his hand thrown pieces. He did slab type square pottery late in his career and also produced mozaic sculptures. His work sold at many galleries. The “Salt” gallery in Queenscliff, “Eagles nest” at Airys Inlet and the Ryrie street Gallery in Geelong. His work was popular due its quirkiness and variation of glazes.

He gave pottery away after a 30 year career in 1992 when his back was too sore to carry his work to the kiln. He then concentrated on his painting career where he specialised in oil paints. His pieces are signed “Jackman”, “J.Jackman” or “Jack Jackman” depending on how he felt that particular day. Pieces not considered worthy for the gallery were often donated to charities.

His son Bill has also produced pottery signed “Jackman” or “Bill Jackman”.

It turns out that we also have a number of pieces made by Bill Jackman.  Although both sometimes incised their marks, and sometimes used a paint brush, the two signatures can be  told apart by the way the letter K is written, with Bill using a lower case, and Jack an upper case form.  More good news is that, when we sell our Jack Jackman umbrella stand, we have another large vase made by Bill that we can use instead.

 

Known potter #29: David Oswald

This large vessel of flattened spherical shape with copper red glaze made by David Oswald has been in our collection since we bought it at Beaver Galleries in the early 1990s. The curved bamboo handle, the unglazed, carved panel on the front in its gilded frame, and the gilded and carved decoration of the handle supports and central opening lend it a ceremonial, oriental feel.  At 19 cm high (26 with the handle) and 33 cm in diameter, it holds sway in any room in which it is displayed.

David Oswald is a Brisbane-based potter from Cairns, Northern Queensland, who has been working as a ceramist for many years. In the 1990s, he and Ted Secombe formed a company to market their works to corporations, hotel chains and resorts. This venture is described in Pottery in Australia, 36/1:13-15. The highly finished base with its classy ‘OZ’ seal and impressed number reflect this marketing approach.

In spite of this, the quality of his work, and the number of pieces that must now grace boardrooms and hotel foyers in Australia and overseas, he has a surprisingly low profile in the print media and on the Internet. He maintained a website from 1999-2003 but it has been taken down now.   Toward the end of that time,  he was working eight months of the year as a ceramic artist and had become involved in property development projects and architectural glass making ( Gold Coast Bulletin (1 March 2003 and 24 April 2004).

 

Known potter #28: Chris Myers

David and I are busy assigning prices to the works to be sold in the gallery and in our online catalogue. For each item, we have to take into account what we paid for it (and works like it), the overheads of running a gallery, what we think customers will be prepared to pay, and how much we ourselves can bear to part with it.

As an example, we won this very large (7.5 cm high and 47.5 cm in diameter.) dish made by Chris Myers at last month’s Shapiro auction for a hammer price of $450. With the buyer’s premium and other charges, it actually cost us around $550.  We also needed to amortise the cost of our trip to Sydney, bringing the acquisition cost to about $600. Our minimum possible selling price therefore has to be around $700 (with GST) if we are not to lose money on our investment.

The seller would have realised about $360 for the dish, highlighting the extent to which buying and selling costs contribute to the inflation of prices each time a work changes hands at auction. Whether the dish will sell at its new asking price will soon be tested. What it is worth to potential buyers will depend on a number of factors. For some, it will be just a matter of whether they like it and have a place for it in their home. Others will be interested in Myers’ standing in the history of Australian contemporary pottery and where this dish sits in his oeuvre.

David and I first encountered Myers’ work at Beaver Galleries in the mid-1990s when we bought this large (30.5 cm high) vase, liking it  for the balance between its simple, elegant form and its extraordinarily complex decoration, built up by sand-blasting and/or acid-etching the previously fired glazed surface and applying low-fire lustres.

By the mid 1990s, Myers had been working as a potter for many years, setting up his first studio in 1973 after training at the Caulfield Institute of Technology. Directory entries place him at Kaligda Pottery, in Frankston, Victoria, in 1981, and at Beachside Pottery at Aspendale, Victoria, in 1996, as well as lecturing at the Caulfield Institute, then at Monash University’s Peninsula School of Art.  He has a presence in Pottery in Australia, 27/1(1988):33, 28/2(1989):45 & 72; and 36/2(1997):52, and he was one of the artists represented in Skepsi’s Celebrating the Master exhibition in 2004.

Myers signs his work using an impressed ‘Cm’ seal. The second mark on the Shapiro dish is the Kaligda Pottery seal, dating it probably a decade earlier than the vase. (The Beachside Pottery seal is an impressed crab.) Although both exhibit Myers’ characteristic post-firing techniques, the two-level gilded acanthus-leaf decoration on the dish is quite different from the three-level geometric design on the vase with its half-lustred surface.  The dish is more robust and open, the vase more refined and illusive, taking on different qualities in different lights.  Acquiring the dish has already given us a better understanding of the scope of work of this potter, and it won’t be a bad thing if we have to keep them both with us for a while, in order to learn more.

 

Known potter #27: Leonard Bell

This large casserole dish with white glaze and hand-painted floral decoration was made by Leonard Bell. It has his impressed LB mark on the side. We bought it from a Melbourne auction house thinking that it was by Les Blakebrough. I have just finished re-attributing a number of pieces in our collection that were sold as Blakebroughs, but turn out to be Bell’s. Bell’s mark is similar, but the mark itself is bigger, the characters are sans serif and the L slopes to the right.

A discussion on the Identifying Australian Pottery forum has just brought this to light. In my blog entry on Les Blakebrough,  I had included a picture of  a Bell mug as an example of Blakebrough’s work.  A similar pair of mugs had been listed on eBay with a Mondrook Pottery stamp. A forum member speculated on the connection. Another replied that there was none – both were the work of Leonard Bell. I checked my database and found a record for Leonard Bell in the 1981 Potter’s Directory.

In 1981, Bell was working at Woodstock Pottery, Woodstock-On-Loddon (near Bendigo), which he had established in 1976. He trained at Bendigo College of Advanced Education, 1961-4 and Technical Teachers College, Toorak, 1967, and worked for John Davidson at his New Mills Pottery in Cornwall from 1974-5.  The entry includes a drawing of his LB mark and another WP mark for the pottery. Brett Robertson, reviewing an exhibition held at the Bendigo CAE in 1987, talks about “Len Bell’s technically flawless lidded jar” (Pottery in Australia, 27/3 (1987), p. 70).These are the only two references that I have been able to find. Subsequently, Bell must have moved his pottery to Mondrook on the mid north coast of NSW. The pottery still has a web presence but Bell is now retired.

Why did we so willingly accept that our Bell’s were Blakebrough’s?  Well, they were all sold as Blakebrough’s and, as collectors based in Canberra, we had only seen a small sample of his work. Our casserole dish is made in a style not totally unlike the domestic ware from the mid 1970s illustrated in Jonathan Holmes’ book on Blakebrough, with feldspar glaze and iron decoration. We assumed that the celadon ware with black orchid motif,  which characterises much of Bell’s work, was a Blakebrough production line.

The Bell pieces are finely made and we are glad to have them in our collection.  The thing is, though, that we did pay rather more for the casserole dish than we would have if it had been listed as a Bell. Early works by master potters engender competition and fetch high prices at auction. We certainly won’t be able to recover our investment. But the real issue is that mis-attribution colours our perception of the achievement of both potters. This is why the new forum is proving so valuable.  It has been running for only a few months, but already I’ve learnt a great deal from people noticing connections and willing to share their knowledge.

 

Known potter #26: Frank Rock

This set of six harlequin ramekins shaped like fish was made by Frank Rock in the 1950s. Ford (1) tells us that Rock was a retired Dutch ceramic engineer who set up a studio in Balmoral, Sydney in 1950 and continued working there until the late 1950s, making a small range of slipcast functional ware, using brilliant glazes and foliage decoration reminiscent of Javanese art .

The  fish-shaped ramekins must have been his most popular line, given how many are still around. These are 4 cm high, 17 cm long and 12.5 cm wide and there is a narrow coloured rim around the bowl. Sets turn up from time to time made from a larger and shallower mould without the rim – 3 cm high, 19.5 cm long and 14 cm wide. Of Rock’s other designs, I’ve only seen two ashtrays so far, but I’m keeping my eyes out for more.

There is something about fish-shaped ramekins that must have appealed to the 1950s housewife. The Sydney commercial pottery Diana made a fish-shaped ramekin with a master dish in the same shape. I have a full set of these inherited from my mother. I like the Rock ones better though. They have a weight and muscularity that appeals to me, and I like the spiral of colour on the base and the flourished monogam.

About a year ago we bought a set of fish-shaped ramekins made by Jan Gluch  that were identical in shape and size to the set pictured here. Dorothy Johnston (2) tells us that Gluch migrated to Australia with his family in 1957. Danish by birth to Polish parents, he trained in Danish ceramic factories, and was an experienced potter by the time he arrived in Australia. He worked for Pates while living at the Villawood migrant hostel, then rented Easton’s Pottery at Willoughby, and made works for Kalmar in 1959, before setting up his own pottery and pottery school at Brookvale in 1960.  So I’m guessing that he either worked for Frank Rock for a while in the late 1950s, or took over some of his moulds.

Gluck was one of many potters in Australia who worked in commercial potteries then made the transition to studio pottery in the 1960s and 1970s. His work has a presence in early issues of Pottery in Australia. He passed his interest in pottery on to his son, the  potter Ivan Gluch, who is now based on the south-east coast. He  was exhibiting some recent work at the Spiral Gallery in Bega. when we visited there yesterday.

The joys of making small connections…

Postscript: Ivan Gluch has let me know that the fish ramekin moulds were at Easton’s pottery when his parents took it over. He also advised me of a few errors in the  details of his father’s life in The People’s Potteries, which I’ve corrected in the entry.

1. Encyclopedia of Australian Potters’ Marks, 2nd ed., 2002, p.191)
2. The People’s Potteries, 2002, pp. 33-34.
3. Email from Ivan Gluch dated 1 September 2009.

 

Known potter #25: Ian Drummond

Among the pots that we put to work in our home is a large (11 cm high and 39 cm in diameter) bowl made by Ian Drummond. We use this as our fruit bowl and it does a fine job, sometimes decorating the dining table, sometimes set within easy reach under the kitchen window.

This morning I emptied it to give it a wash and took a moment to appreciate the abstract swirl of colours and the fine craquelature of the glaze. The outside of the bowl is a very intense ultramarine and the rim is gilded. The white stoneware foot ring and base are unglazed and the potter’s mark – Drummond – has been painted on the base in brown oxide.

We first saw Drummond’s work at Beaver Galleries in the 1990s, then noticed pieces starting to appear on the secondary market in the same distinctive style. The artist page on the Herons Gallery Castlemaine website is the only published source of information about him that we have been able to find. This says that he has a degree in architecture, a diploma of art, and training in sumi-e painting; that he set up the Greenhill Pottery in 1980; and that he makes stoneware  decorated with feldspathic glazes coloured with oxides of chrome, cobalt, copper and iron.

The broad semi-transparent brush strokes and vibrant colours applied to our bowl are particularly suited to the finely made hemispherical form. We have a smaller bowl where the brush strokes have been applied to the outside of the form and the inside is monochrome and it works equally well.

 

Known potter #24: Chris James

This saggar-fired vessel is 27 cm high (including its ceramic stand) and 22 cm in diameter. The 7 cm thick shell is made up of curved and layered, vertical plates of clay. The jagged top has been left unglazed, as though the ovoid form has been torn asunder. The inside surface is glazed a matt black, the outside is dry glazed with terrasigilata decoration. The maker is Chris James, a potter with a workshop currently based at the Keane Ceramics factory site in Somersby, NSW.

We bought this piece at Solander Gallery in Deakin, ACT, in 1996. Solander is primarily a fine art gallery but the 8th National Ceramics Conference was held in Canberra that year and satellite exhibitions had overflowed into all available spaces. The one at Solander, curated by Leonard Smith, included the work of 7 potters but the series of forms based on Jupiter and its moons Europa and Io by Chris James particularly caught our eye. David has always had an interest in astronomy and we both like science fiction. We were astonished to see clay being used in such an innovative way to depict the power and energy of planetary objects, as well as providing a glimpse of their interiors.

James was born in 1964 in Fiji and spent his early ears there. He obtained a Ceramics Certificate from the National Art School in 1986, and then set up a studio in Wahroonga, NSW, teaching ceramics part time in the Northern Sydney TAFE system.  In his 1996 directory entry he says  that he jumps between many styles, including saggar and wood firing, reduced stoneware and majolica. He moved his studio to the Keane factory in 2001 and, at around the same time, also adopted the trade name of Chris James Ceramic Design and started to market a range of slipcast porcelain and an associated design and manufacturing service.

Our ‘Io’ vessel is unsigned, but other work may be signed with the potter’s full name according to the 1996 directory entry. We have since acquired only one other work attributed to James, a stoneware majolica teaset. The teapot (illustrated) has two impressed marks which I think depict a hand and a paw.

References

• “Chris James,” The Australian Potters Directory (The Potters Society of Australia, 1996).
• “Chris James,” Australian Ceramics Directory (viewed 21 March 2009).
• Keane Ceramics. History (viewed 21 March 2009).
• Leonard Smith, 8th National Ceramic Conference, Australia (CLAYART Archives, 11 July 1996).
• Pottery by Christopher James & Tanya Myers (CV, [1996]).

 

Known potter #23: Alan Peascod

After ten months packed away in a shipping container on our block, this 30 cm high, reduced lustre jug, signed and dated ‘Peascod 83′ now graces the downstairs foyer in our new house. We first saw it exhibited at the Watson Craft Centre in 1983 or 1984 and had to own it.  I can’t remember the exact price but I think it was around $375. This was an enormous amount for us to pay for a piece of pottery at that time, but worth every dollar for the pleasure it has given us over the years.

Alan Peascod (1945-2007) was born in England and came to Australia with his family in 1952. His father, the Illawarra painter Bill Peascod ((1920-1985), awakened his interest in painting and drawing, but he chose to become a potter, obtaining a ceramics certificate from East Sydney Technical College in 1965. His teachers – Peter Rushforth at ESTC and Les Blakebrough at Sturt Pottery where he spent six months in 1966 – trained him in the Anglo-Oriental tradition, and this is reflected in early works illustrated in Pottery in Australia. Nevertheless, he found the adherence to Leachian principles in  England restrictive during the  twelve months he spent in London in 1968,  preferring the medieval pottery he saw there.

On his return to Australia, he worked from his own studio at Mt Kembla and taught for two years at Wollongong Technical College, before taking up a position at the Canberra School of Art and teaching there from 1972 to 1984. It was there in 1972 that he met Said el-Sadr, an Egyptian with an interest in reduced lustre ceramics. This changed his life, leading him to visit Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Spain and Europe to study Islamic ceramics.

Our jug dates from the end of this period and represents a mature artist’s adaptation of  Islamic traditions to his own aesthetic. In the photograph, light from the window is reflected in the lustrous black glaze which covers the whole surface, from the flat base to the spout. The wide globular body is thrown in two pieces and joined at the shoulder. The dark surface is decorated in silver and gold lustre, irridescing in places to pink and blue.

The ewer shape, with its angled, closed spout, and the calligraphic nature of the decoration, allude to Islamic art and the spiritual world of the Qu’ran, but the overall effect is modern and secular. The decoration consists of loose arabesques and abstract plant forms. The patterned band around the neck, on inspection, consists of scribbled lines. A panel on the side contains the head and shoulders of a man who could be seen as medieval or clerical, but might just be a slightly comic or satirical everyman figure. Below this, another panel alludes to human artefacts of some kind but the decorative scheme as a whole is too abstract to support any specific iconographic interpretation.

After leaving Canberra, Peascod was head of the ceramics department at the Glasgow School of Art from 1985-1986,  and  at the Illawarra Institute of Technology from 1987–98. He was awarded a Doctorate in Creative Arts in 1995 for his research at Wollongong University from 1987-1995. The inspiration for a range of figurative ceramics came out of this research. In 1999 he retired from teaching and moved with his family to a property near Gulgong, NSW. An interest in majolica was sparked by a residency in Gubbio, Italy, in August/September 1999 which he attended with Stephen Bowers and Pippin Drysdale. It was there he met the Italian potter Giampietro Rampini. In 2002 he received an Australian Foundation for Studies in Italy Grant to work with Rampini in Gubbio, where he researched 16th century maiolica techniques.

Peascod’s death in 2007 left many mourning the loss of a significant figure in Australian and International ceramics whose understanding of clay’s creative potential he had passed on to many students over the years.  Owen Rye (2007, p. 12) perhaps best summarises his achievements in the following paragraph:

Over the years his innovative and unusually extensive repertoire on vessels included various dry glazes, lustres (reduced and resinate including his signature all gold works), alkaline glazes, majolica, and saturated metallics, as well as a variety of post-firing finishes. Each type required a different approach both conceptually and technically, and he developed many specialised kilns to achieve overall technologies unique to him. Some, such as the dry glaze, were his inventions, and others, such as the reduced lustre techniques, are his revivals of traditional technologies at a standard few others can match.

For various reasons, we have never bought another Peascod piece. We have been content with our jug and find it gives us a connection to the rest of his work, which we see from time to time in art galleries and exhibitions. Peascod’s website is still active and contains information about his artistic background and the five major areas in which he worked – majolica, dry glaze, lustre, figures and etchings.

References

• Shirley Moule, “Alan Peascod”, Pottery in Australia, 11#1, Autumn 1972, pp. 4-6.
• Peter Haynes, “Alan Peascod”, Pottery in Australia, 24#3, August/September 1985, pp. 33-39.
  
• Owen Rye, “Alan Peascod’s dream of flight”, Ceramics Art & Perception; #58, 2004, pp. 44-46.
• Simone Fraser, “Reflections”, Journal of Australian Ceramics, 46#1, April 2007, p. 9.
• Owen Rye, “Alan Peascod 1943 – 2007“, Journal of Australian Ceramics, 46#1, April 2007, pp. 10-15.
• Works by Alan Peascod, Falls Gallery (viewed 1 February, 2009).
• Alan Peascod (website, viewed 1 February 2009).  ..note that the links do not work in Firefox

 

Known potter #22: Marea Gazzard

We were very pleased to win this 30 cm high coil-built red earthenware vase with beaten and paddled surface at a Sotheby’s auction in May this year. Undamaged, it would have cost more than we could afford, but it has a hairline crack down the side. This has enabled us to acquire our first Marea Gazzard. As a bonus, it came with a smaller undamaged vase from the same series.

Over the last few months both pieces have had pride of place on the mantelpiece in the dining room of the house we are renting. We spend much of our time in this room, which is almost completely filled by our dining table. This has given us an opportunity to get intimately acquainted with the two Gazzards and to like them for their own sakes, not just as a means of filling a gap in our collection.

In the auction catalogue the lot was described as ‘two terracotta vases, each of irregular amorphic baluster form’. I looked up amorphic and it means ‘having no defined shape’ or ‘lacking form’. Gazzard is celebrated for her exploration of form and I think the author must have meant to say ‘anthropomorphic’. Certainly, they are like hollow torsos, with a definite back and front,  and a sense of having been caught in motion.

Marea Gazzard was born in Sydney to Greek-Australian parents in 1928. She trained in ceramics at the East Sydney Technical College in 1953-54 and the London Central School for Arts and Crafts in 1956-57.  On her return to Australia in 1960, she set up a studio in Paddington and it was here in around 1963-65 that I think our two Gazzards were made. There is a picture in Christine France’s Marea Gazzard: form and clay (Craftsman House, 1994, ill. 8, p. 46) of a series of spherical pots made in 1963. These are also made of red earthenware clay and several of the smaller pots have a similar shape to ours.

Gazzard’s international status as sculptor and craftsperson is well described in France’s book and elswehere so I won’t go into detail here.  She is often cited as running counter to the Leach tradition. In a curious reversal, she had a thorough grounding in wheel-throwing techniques under Peter Rushforth at the East Sydney Technical College before turning to hand-building in London under the influence of fellow student Ruth Duckworth.

Our Gazzards are unmarked and this may not have been unusual. A piece in the Powerhouse Museum has been signed and dated Gazzard with a felt-tipped pen after it was fired. However, I have also seen an example in a catalogue with an impressed seal – an M in a double squared-off circle.

 

Known potter #21: Sylvia Halpern

This small (10 cm high) handbuilt vase was made by Sylvia Halpern in 1976. It is ball-shaped with a trefoil pinched mouth. The inside is glazed a pale flesh colour. The exterior has been paddled, pitted, gouged, rubbed, painted and trail-glazed to create a heavily worked surface.

To tell you the truch, I have been having trouble liking it, which is why I have photographed it so carefully. If it had been very large, I might have been able to admire it as a ceramic sculpture, but it is domestic in size and form. The way the sides are pushed in makes me uneasy and the surface is also troubling. I feel myself falling into the error of thinking “a child of six could do this”.

David, by contrast, likes it a lot. When I ask why, he points out how finely worked the clay is at the top and how the delicacy of the glazed interior is exposed by the pinched mouth. This is the work of someone who has mastered the handbuilding process, not a beginner. What I see as misshapen he sees as deliberately made to have that shape. He indicates passages of colour and texture on the surface that he finds particularly interesting and shows how they are bound to the form.

The difference in opinion is revealing and I feel a little ashamed. It is easy to like beautifully shaped and finished pots and much harder to come to terms with a piece worked to reflect some inner compulsion. It may be wrong to judge a work by what we knew of its creator but 1976 was the year that Sylvia’s husband Artur (Artek) Halpern died. This pot, and others made around the same time, may reflect some of what she was feeling at that time. Or perhaps it is just that, as a mature artist in her late fifties, she had reached a particular way of working with clay as an expressive medium.

Artur Halpern was one of the founding members of the Potters’ Cottage when it  opened in 1958 in a small miner’s hut near the Warrandyte bridge. The other founding members were Reg Preson, Phyl Dunn, Gus McLaren and Charles Wilton. Sylvia, with Kate Janeeba and Elsa Arden, joined the group in 1961 after the cottage was moved to a farmhouse at the corner of Jumping Creek and Ringwood-Warrandyte roads. The last member of the group was Peter Laycock, who joined in 1969.

This often-cited sequence of events tends to give Artur more prominence in the history of Australian contemporary pottery than Sylvia but she was already a potter when they met. Born in Poland in 1908, Artur had trained as a civil engineer in Czechoslovakia. Then, his life having been interrupted by war and military service, he migrated to Australia in 1945 and began looking for a way of establishing himself in his new country. Sylvia’s work sparked his interest in the technical aspects of firing and in pottery as a marketable product. He learnt the techniques of mould making and slip casting from an Italian ceramic craftsman. In 1950, the couple set up a workshop at Huntingdale, Melbourne, employing a small team to make production wares like the jug opposite under the name SYLHA.

I suspect that in 1958,  while Artur was exploring new ways of exhibiting and selling their wares with the other founding members of the Potters’ Cottage, Sylvia was busy looking after their new daughter (the potter and mosaicist Deborah Halpern, born in 1957), running the pottery business and handling the move from Huntingdale to Warrandyte. Mike Kusnik, who worked briefly for the SYLHA Ceramic Studio in 1959, refers to it as “a successful giftware pottery run by Sylvia Halpern and her husband”. I am assuming from this that she had a considerable hand in its day-to-day operation.

Ann Geroe, writing about the Potters’ Cottage in 2004 says “Then there were the Halperns, Artek making abundant bonsai containers, Sylvia making more individual pots influenced by her birth in Japan” (p. 21).  Sylvia was born in 1918 but I haven’t been able to find anything else about her childhood in Japan. A brief biographical entry in Pottery in Australia, 3(3), 1964 says that she trained at the Melbourne Technical College and also reflects her status as a potter at that time. There is an iconic photograph on the McLaren Pottery website showing her in her garden at Warrandyte with pottery around her. Her work featured in the “Connections 4″ exhibition held at the Potters’ Cottage (now the Potters’ Gallery) in October 2003 to celebrate 45 years of operation. At that time she was still living in Warrandyte.

The Halperns both worked mainly in earthenware, although Artur experimented with stoneware towards the end of his life. He signed his wheel-thrown work HALPERN or AH. Sylvia made mostly hand-built and unglazed pieces, usually signed Sylvia Halpern. The production work is signed SYLHA. Artur’s younger brother Stanislav (Stasha), who lived in Australia from1939-1951 and 1966-1969, also made pottery. His works are signed SHalpern. We have several of Stanislav’s pieces and they too take a little time to appreciate but reward further study.

References

• “Biographies”, Pottery in Australia, 3(3), 1964.
• Bouma, Monique, “Gallery’s 45 years end Sunday”, Manningham Leader, 31 March 2004.
• Cole, Bill, “End of an era”, Pottery in Australia, 16(1), 1977, pp. 70-71.
• Ford, Geoff, “Halpern, Artur”, “Halpern, Stanislav” and “Halpern, Sylvia”, Encyclopedia of Australian Potters’ Marks, 2nd ed. Wodonga, Vic. : Salt Glaze Press, c2002.
• Geroe, Anne and and Jo Laurence, “Connection: Ann Geroe and Jo Laurence look back on forty five years of the Potters’ Cottage in Warrandyte, Victoria”, Journal of Australian Ceramics, 43(1), 2004, p. 21.
• Hodge, Karen, “Pioneers at Potters fire up again”, Doncaster Templestowe News, 24 September 2003.
• Kusnik, Mike,  “About Mike“, Armchair Potting (viewed 31 October, 2008).
• “Potters Cottage“, frame from mclaren-pottery.com (viewed 31 October, 2008).
• Timms, Peter, “Halpern, Stanislaw (Stacha) (1919 – 1969)“, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, Melbourne University Press, 1996, p. 362.