“State of the West”

David and I have just spent a week in Perth. While there we visited the Fremantle Arts Centre and bought this wood-fired bowl by Stewart Scambler, a long-time potter and teacher who is currently president of the Ceramic Arts Association of Western Australia (CAAWA). Scambler specialises in wood firing and he and his wife Trish also produce maiolica domestic ware.

That same afternoon we were lucky enough to catch The State of the West: A Ceramic Survey 2008 at the Central TAFE Art Gallery. This exhibition, which closed yesterday, was a survey of works made in the last year by 45 of the best established and emerging Western Australian ceramic artists as selected by CAAWA. Many of the artists represented, including Scambler himself, were known to us but we were able to ‘collect’ a number of new potters.

David thought that the ceramic sculptures in the exhibition by Bela Kotai were standouts - monumental in form yet finely carved. I loved the figurative works by Fleur Schell, Amanda Shelster and Wing Chow. We would have been happy to find a home for almost every piece, but selected just three - raku pots in contrasting styles by Njalikwa Chongwe and Francine Haine and a lustre vase by Tova Dilkes-Hoffman.

An exhibition catalogue on CD was for sale for $10. It contained a pdf file with a complete set of artists’ statements, CVs and pictures, but no marks, unfortunately! I was pleased to have the file but would have liked to see this information published online with a “creative commons” licencing approach and a bookmarkable location. (I hope this will happen now the exhibition is closed.)

 

Australian pottery at Bemboka

You may have been wondering what David and I do with all the pottery we own. The answer is that we live with pieces all around us. However, the pottery we have been buying second-hand in recent years mainly goes into storage after a short time on display. We have been stockpiling it as part of a master plan to retire to the country and set up a gallery devoted to Australian Pottery, 1960s to date.

Next week we embark on the next stage of our lives by moving to Bemboka, the ‘village in a valley’ at the foot of Brown Mountain on the way to the NSW south coast. This is a picture of our virgin block after the cows had stopped grazing on it. The builders have now started work and we hope to open the gallery in early 2009. Meantime we are renting a house nearby.

When we tell people our plans most ask if we are potters ourselves. The answer is no. We love pottery and marvel at how it was produced. We admire the strength and industry of potters and the level of technical knowledge and skill needed to bring their ideas to fruition. But neither of us has ever felt ‘the call to clay’.

 

Art or craft

This series of nine soda-glazed porcelain oil cans by Maryke Henderson was exhibited at the Canberra Potters’ Society annual exhibition under the title Family in 2006, where it won the Doug Alexander award for that year.

Henderson is a Canberra potter who graduated as a mature-age student from the Canberra School of Art in 2005 and was one of four 2005 ANU graduates to participate in the Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS 06). She was also one of the Canberra artists represented in Impact, an exhibition from Canberra and the region held in Brisbane from 8th to 18th July 2006 in association with Verge, the 11th National Ceramic Conference.

David and I both knew that we wanted to own Family as soon as we saw that it had not been sold and that the price was within our reach. We liked the quirky oil can forms and the way the soda-glazing technique had been used to clothe the porcelain bodies in soft and subtle patterns and tones. We also liked the way the taller oil cans seemed to herd their smaller brethren.

In group exhibitions works by the same artist are often arranged together for display. This accidental association creates a whole greater than its parts. The shared features of each piece contribute to a group ethos and it can be hard to select just one that encapsulates the quality of the whole. In this case Henderson saw characteristics of her own family in the grouping and made it an expression of a single work, thus releasing us from the burden of choice.

Recently $45,000 was achieved at a Deutscher and Hackett auction for a Gwyn Hanssen Pigott work entitled Shadow, a grouping of twelve crafted objects. Chris Sanders, reviewing a 2004 exhibition of similar groupings by Hanssen Pigott in Craft Culture, observes that together they create a “musical-like rhythm and harmony”. The origin of each piece as a crafted object is transcended, creating a tension between craft and art that gives the group the status of a fine art object.

I am not sure whether Henderson would have created Family without the precedent set by Hanssen Pigott or whether we would have responded so readily to it as a work but we are very pleased with it. The pieces are arrayed on a tall cupboard in our living room, somewhat crowded in their domestic setting but still together.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of it in future years and where it ends up when the time comes to put it up for re-sale. Will it be dismantled and sold as separate objects or will its integrity as a group be recognised and conserved? I guess that will depend on the market and on Henderson’s perceived status as a ceramic artist at that time.

 

Contemporary Australiana

On 1-2 October this year Leonard Joel auctioned 1,000 items from Marvin Hurnall’s collection in a marathon two-day event. Hurnall is a well-known collector and dealer in Australiana based in Melbourne. This article in the Australian dated 19 September explains the background to the sale.

The auction included quantities of work by all the usual suspects, including Grace Seccombe, William Ricketts , Melrose and Remued. We weren’t able to go but I trawled through the catalogue looking for things of interest. This provided a fascinating insight into what might be considered contemporary Australiana and I have been meaning for some time to write up the results.

As expected, the Leach/Hamada tradition was not very well represented. There were just a few Harold Hughan pieces and a John Gilbert platter. While the work of master potters like Hughan may be included in Australiana auctions it would be hard to argue that they have a distinctly Australian style. By contrast there were numerous post-war works by David and Hermia Boyd, Klytie Pate and Carl Cooper, all potters seen as quintessentially Australian.

Decoration was a feature of most of the more recent pieces in the auction. The standout for us was a very large (56 cm diameter) charger by Stephen Bowers painted using polychrome underglaze colours with sulphur crested cockatoos (lot 786). This sold for a hammer price of $3,250. Bowers was a trainee at the Jam Factory in Adelaide in 1982 and is now its managing director. In his work he combines Australian motifs with allusions to earlier ceramic traditions.

There were also three pieces made in 1989 by Barbara Swarbrick, a potter based in Thornbury, Victoria, who decorates functional forms with richly coloured and dramatic images of Australian birds and foliage. Of these we liked best lot 186, a deep, wide-rimmed pedestal bowl with inside and outside surfaces completely covered in decoration.

The bird theme was continued in a terracotta vase dated around 1995 by the Hermannsburg potter Judith Inkamala (lot 788). This not only has birds painted on the surface of the pot but the lid is moulded in the form of two yellow and green parrots.

The Works by Bower, Swarbrick and Inkamala can be firmly classed as Australiana because of their Australian subjects but there were also works in the auction by Deborah Halpern and Jenny Orchard that might be seen as exemplifying an Australian style. Both of these artists use clay as a sculptural medium, decorate their surfaces in bold, brash colours and use figurative motifs in their work.

Halpern is a Melbourne artist and daughter of the potters Artur and Sylvia Halpern. Her signature big face was seen in both the lots in the auction (571 and 953). Orchard is a Sydney artist born in Turkey and bought up in Zimbabwe. She creates highly idiosyncratic and quirky slip-cast functional forms and figural sculptures. Both streams of her work were represented at the auction. Lot 234 was a narrow cylindrical vase and lots 249 and 951 were both animal-like figures assembled in a haphazard way, like a child’s toy, from a variety of separately moulded pieces.

Three other Melburne artists using clay as a sculptural medium were represented in the auction. Lot 511 was a large, colourful and humorous coil-built figure of a camel and circus acrobat by Paula Frost, who trained as a fashion designer. There were four ceramic pieces by Greg Irvine, a painter who also creates expressionist human figures out of clay. Of these, we liked best lot 840, a male ballet dancer, with an attenuated form and a face like an ancient bronze mask. Lastly, there were a number of pieces by June Arnold, a sculptor in both clay and bronze who is best-known for the dolphin fountain in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne, made in 1982.

In summary, it seems that Australian motifs, painterly decoration incorporating strong colour and figural motifs, quirky ceramic forms and figural sculpture are all characteristics of contemporary ceramics that would attract the eye of an Australiana collector.

It is hard with an auction like this to know what to bid on, particularly if you can’t be present, but we did in the end place four absentee bids. Of these only one was successful and we are now the slightly-bemused owners of the large (44 cm high) multi-necked June Arnold vase (lot 797) illustrated at the head of this entry.

 

Working pots

This is a picture of our dinner table late one Saturday night. The ‘wrought iron’ cheese plate with twisted handles was made by Gary and Fran Palecek at their Tallaganda pottery in Braidwood in the late 1980s. We have other platters but this is the one we always use for cheese. The pale yellow colours are set off by the richly dark but slightly roughened surface and the angled sides prevent things from sliding off when carrying it to the table.

The fruit dish was made by the Canberra potter Kaye Pemberton. Cherries and red grapes always look wonderful when placed in this dish because of its shallow profile and olive green hatched lines. I put white grapes in a different bowl. The potter’s mark ‘KP’ is impressed on the side of the foot ring but we had forgotten who had made it until we saw some of her work with the same mark exhibited this year.

The tiny bowl on the cheese plate with the olives in it was made by Rod Dilkes, a Western Australian potter based at Margaret River. His work is characterised by glowing dark colours and Persian-style lustres. I always choose a Dilkes bowl for things like olives or pickled onions or stir-fried noodles that have their own lustrous surfaces.

We have a lot of working pots and get great pleasure from them. I use this faceted wood-fired teapot and cup made by Moraig McKenna every morning while going through eBay listings before David gets up. I have made hundreds of pots of peppermint tea in it since I bought it three years ago at the Laughing Frog Pottery near Gundaroo (now the Old St Lukes Studio). The handle broke yesterday and I was bereft. I carried it down to the study this morning but I will need to find a replacement. It was heavy and warm in the hand like an old friend but it doesn’t pour as well as it used to.

 

Dynasty

It has taken me a while to sort out the various members of the Boyd family and their potting activities, even with the help of Geoff Ford’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Potter’s Marks. I’ll start with Merric Boyd (1888-1959), known as the father of Australian art pottery because of his tenuous forms inspired by Australian flora and fauna. He and his wife Doris (1883-1960) had a pottery at Murrumbeena where they led a sometimes precarious existence selling pottery to the Melbourne market. Merric began potting in 1912 and continued to make pots until his death in 1959.

Their five children, Lucy (1916-), Arthur (1920-1999), Guy (1923-1988), David (1924-) and Mary (1926-) all made pottery at some stage in their lives, as did Lucy’s husband Hatton Beck (1901-1994) , Arthur’s wife Yvonne (1920-), David’s wife Hermia (1931-2000) and Mary’s first husband John Perceval (1923-2000). Lucy’s son Robert Beck (1942-) and his wife Margot are also potters, as is Guy’s daughter Derry (1957-).

Robert and Margot Beck made this cheese dish with domed cover given to me by colleagues when I left work to go back to university in 1979. It illustrates the extent to which painting and pottery was closely intertwined in the Boyd family. Doris was a talented painter and decorated some of her husband’s pots. Their children learnt to make and decorate pottery at their parents’ knees and were able to use this skill as a way of making a living while they explored other areas of interest such as painting and sculpture. They married other artists and drew them into the family tradition. The second-world war interrupted their lives but also led them to new artistic associations.

Merric’s father Arthur Merric Boyd (1862-1940) was a painter, not a potter, but his name lives on in the Arthur Merric Boyd (AMB) Pottery set up by his grandson Arthur, John Perceval and Peter Herbst at Murrumbeena in 1944. (Actually, they bought Hatton Beck’s pottery when the Becks moved to Brisbane.) The pair of ramekins illustrated at the head of this entry were made at this pottery and hand painted by John Perceval. Arthur left Australia for England in 1958 and went on to become one of Australia’s most significant painters, but pieces with various AMB marks continued to be made until 1962.

Similarly, Merric’s younger brother Martin (1893-1972) was a writer not a potter, but his name lives on in the Sydney-based Martin Boyd Pottery set up by Guy with partners Norma and Leonard Flegg in 1946. Guy was training as a sculptor at the East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) after the war and needed an interim source of income. He returned to Melbourne in 1951 but the Fleggs continued to operate the Martin Boyd Pottery as a successful venture until overseas imports put it out of business in 1963 (Dorothy Johnston, The Peoples’ Potteries, pp. 87-91).

Ford (p. 43) records the year of Guy’s return to Melbourne as 1955. In fact, he transferred his interest in the pottery to Leonard’s brother Ronald in 1951. On his return to Melbourne, he set up a new pottery, the Guy Boyd Pottery, in 1952. He and his wife operated this until 1964, when he sold it to devote himself full-time to sculpture (Guide to the papers of Guy and Phyllis Boyd, MS 7551, National Library of Australia).

Guy’s brother David worked with him as a thrower in Sydney in the start-up post-war years. This is where he met Hermia, an art student at ESTC experimenting with decoration at the pottery in her spare time. They lived and worked in Australia, England and France before closing their last pottery in Murrumbeena in 1968 to concentrate on other interests - David on painting and Hermia on etchng and sculpture (John Vader, The Pottery of David and Hermia Boyd, Matthews/Hutchinson, 1977).

To my 1970s-trained eye, David and Hermia Boyd’s work is often quirky and unusual. Their style owes nothing to the Leach Hamada tradition. They used a range of techniques based on white earthenware or terracotta clay (as in this example), metallic lustres and washes, sgraffito drawing through tin or black glaze and underglaze or overglaze decoration. They were influenced by French provincial pottery and medieval imagery.

Their work was marketed as art pottery through exhibitions rather than stores. In 1960 they were guest exhibitors at the Potters’ Cottage in Warrandyte where it was reported that great interest was shown in the new techniques they had developed during their overseas travels and prices ranged as high as fifty guineas (Vader, p. 132) .

For collectors, enough Boyd pottery is listed on eBay to merit its own category under ‘Australian Pottery’. Here even small pieces of Merric’s work are priced outside our range. Arthur and Hermia Boyd also attract a lot of interest, as do the larger AMB pieces painted by John Perceval or Neil Douglas.

The majority of eBay listings are from the Martin Boyd Pottery which has its own strong following. Ramekins abound and no wonder because it was the pottery’s most popular production line and nearly a million were made (Johnston, p.90). Ramekins were also a mainstay of the Guy Boyd and AMB Potteries. This form was simple to throw and decorate. The handle also lends aplomb, particularly when incorporated seamlessly into the form and decoration. We haven’t been able to resist setting up a ramekin collecting sideline and now have quite a few excellent examples.

 

Australian art pottery

This small dish with bird decoration made by the Guy Boyd Pottery sometime between 1952-1964 is another of our purchases from the Shapiro auction in Sydney last weekend.

Shapiro is an up-market auction house with a double shop front on Queen Street in Woollahra. It runs seasonal auctions specialising in 19th and 20th century fine and decorative arts. The auction we attended was devoted to Australian art pottery with well over half the lots coming from a single collection. An illustrated catalogue is still available online.

A Marguerite Mahood brush-tail possum sold for a record price for Australian art pottery, going for $23,400. Other prices realised were sometimes above, sometimes below estimates. This brought out the bargain hunter in us, hence the Guy Boyd dish (lot 117, estimate $50-70, hammer price $30, total price with premium $36). Our limited budget precluded any similar acts of speculation but one dealer who had driven up from Victoria took back a number of pieces to re-sell to the Melbourne market.

A camera crew from ABC television’s The Collectors was there, filming the whole auction. I will be interested to see which pieces take Justin Murphy’s eye. Some of the contributors to the book Australian Art Pottery 1900-1950 were also there, possibly to acquire a piece by a favourite maker or to mourn at seeing a collection dispersed or to marvel at some of the prices realised. (The publication of a book can have a significant impact on prices according to this article about the Australian pottery market.)

The auction included quite a few works from the 1960s onwards. These engaged our particular interest but we find ourselves increasingly able to appreciate work from the earlier period. The term ‘art pottery’ itself embraces a wide range of makers. Merric Boyd, the quintessential artist potter, and Remued, a commercial pottery, can both be seen as making art pottery, even though pieces like the wall pocket at lot 4 (Remued 15-10) are from production lines.

We were least interested in the Australiana figures in the auction but Grace Seccombe’s red breasted finch (lot 23) was surprisingly beautiful. And when we saw lot 36 fetch a hammer price of $450, we suddenly realised that there was a William Ricketts face plaque just like it in the family. David has since rescued this from his mother’s garden.

Back home, our Guy Boyd dish proved to be less of a bargain than we had thought, with a bruised rim that other potential buyers must have noticed. However, it is nice to have it around and we may be able to recover our investment on eBay sometime in the future.

 

Describing pottery

We bought this small stoneware oil bottle with celadon glaze, white wrapped cloth effect and wax resist decoration for 99 cents on eBay. It is marked with an impressed “O”. When it arrived I knew that it was a bargain - a well-made functional piece with care taken over its decoration.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott uses “O” as a mark according to the published directories but I am more inclined to attribute this pot to Andrew Halford. Halford took over Shigeo Shiga’s workshop in Terrey Hill, Sydney, in 1979 after five years in Japan. He used an impressed “O” by itself for domestic ware and added “ah” to individual pieces.

These two stoneware teapots with identical design elements are both from Halford’s workshop. We bought the half-glazed brown one in the early 1980s at the Potters’ Place in Kingston. It just has the “O” mark. The one with herringbone inlay is a recent purchase. It dates from the mid 1980s and reflects Halford’s interest in inlaying patterns made using textured objects such as rope pressed into the wet clay. It has both marks.

I have just finished reading Peter Lane’s Ceramic Form: Design and Decoration (1988 and revised 1998). Lane, a British potter and teacher, takes the work of over 150 potters from the Western world and tries to discover what makes the work of each potter individual. He does this by explaining their working methods, the source of their ideas and their different approaches to design and decoration within the confines of two fundamental pottery forms, the bowl and the bottle.

For me, this raises interesting questions about what happens when a piece leaves its maker. Do I need to know who made a pot, what inspired the potter and what techniques were used before I can truly describe it? Certainly, it is much easier to write with confidence about the use of inlay in the herringbone teapot knowing from his Falls Gallery CV that Halford learnt this technique from the Japanese potter Shimoaka Tatsuzo. A pot without provenance must speak for itself. In particular, pieces like the oil bottle which rarely make it into books, galleries or museums can reward study as found objects.

I ask myself these questions when trying to describe a pot: Is the clay stoneware, earthenware, terracotta or porcelain? What colour is it and has it been grogged? Has the pot been wheel-thrown, coil- or slab-built, slip cast or press-moulded? What is its purpose (if any) and what form does it take? Has it been extended by other pieces or altered or carved? What is the nature of the surface decoration and of the firing?

Some things can’t be inferred and I am somewhat daunted by the technical vocabulary. I love the way words like “celadon” and “wax resist” both inform and lend a mystique to the description. I’ve developed a glossary for myself to aid in the process.

At this stage I can’t be certain that the oil bottle is a Halford workshop piece or even that it wasn’t made by Hanssen Pigott. I am not well-enough acquainted with her work. How I wished for a small display of marks in the retrospective exhibition Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: A Survey 1955-2005 at the Victorian National Gallery last year; or at least a few pictures in the printed catalogue.

As an aside, a while ago I was furious with myself for missing a small tin-glazed jug inscribed “Gwyn Hanssen” that was badly mis-listed on eBay. It went to another buyer. At least I was able to collect the mark.

 

Pottery and war

This mug was made by Private J (Jim) F Blondahl, of 2/18 Battalion, while he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Changi. It is now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. It is a simple and well-made domestic object rendered poignant by its inscription: ‘NX610. BLONDAHL. J.F. / CHANGI. XMAS 1944.’ and ‘GOD BLESS / AND PROTECT / BILL / JIM / RONNIE / EDDIE / KENNY / AND DEAR MAUD’.

Anzac Day has reminded me that potters went to war, prisoners became potters through expedience, returned soldiers took up pottery as an occupation or for therapy and overseas potters displaced by war migrated to Australia.

War interrupted people’s lives but also gave them new opportunities to change direction and acquire new skills. Peter Rushforth worked as a typist at Fox Films before joining the army in 1940. He served in Darwin and Malaya, was interred in Changi and worked on the Burmese railway. He started training as a potter only after his return to Melbourne in 1946 His wartime experiences must have affected him profoundly but he does not see this as pertinant to his work as a potter (Peter Rushforth interviewed by Martin Thomas [sound recording], 2005).

Pottery was used as a form of therapy for disabled soldiers in both world wars and sometimes the skills developed were able to be exploited for commercial purposes. The Red Cross set up a Disabled Soldiers’ Pottery in Redfern in 1920 (Ford, Encyclopaedia of Australian Potter’s Marks, 82). Examples of the work produced by this pottery from 1920 to 1925 can be found in the Powerhouse Museum. Pieces also occasionally turn up on eBay or in estate auctions and are snapped up by collectors.

The blind potter Bill Reid lost his sight in Burma during WW2. He began potting in 1945 at Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney. This mug by Reid has a characteristic bark like texture. He was still working as a potter in the 1980s (Lengert, Leonie. Inventive potter [Bill Reid]. St Dunstan’s Review No. 727, March 1981, 4-5).

Peter Rushforth met his wife Bobby, a nurse, while teaching pottery at Concord Repatriation Hospital in 1950, just before taking up a teaching position at the National Art School (Weiss, Karen. From there to here : Australian studio potters/ceramic artists - postwar to postmillennium [thesis], 2005).

The Australian War Memorial has a picture of a Corporal G. Boyd “doing fine work on a clay sculpture” in the Australian Convalescent Depot at Ingleburn, NSW. The picture is dated 10 December 1945. Guy Boyd had been taught pottery by his father Merric Boyd at Murrumbeena and was one of the instructors at Ingleburn. Also teaching pottery at Ingleburn was the Dutch-trained potter Bernard Fiegal a Jewish immigrant whose family had fled Germany at the beginning of WW2. Both ended up establishing commercial potteries in Sydney after the war - the Martin Boyd Pottery and Terra Ceramics (Johnston, The People’s Potteries, 87-8). Guy later returned to Melbourne and set up another pottery there under his own name.

In 1956 Harold Hughan speculated that “the post-war influx to this country of large numbers of former European nationals with their own cultures, many of them fine craftsmen in their own media, will doubtless have its influence and make its own contributions to what in time may become a national idiom” (The Arts Festival of the Olympic Games Melburne, 1956, p.37).

Four decades later, Glenn Cooke questioned the impact of transplanted traditions and found no real evidence of the transference of skills or a shift in craft vocabulary (”Whither Olde Europe? Thoughts on cultural transference in Australia”, Object, No. 3, 1998, 49-53). In the work of four immigrant Queensland potters he found that they were simply “responsive to their location [and] perceptions of the marketplace and directed their work to the perceived demand”.

However, there does seem to be a change in the style of some of the commercial pottery produced during the 1950s and 1960s which e-Bay sellers distinguish from what came before through terms such as “mid-century”, “Eames Era” and “Retro”.

This jug inscribed ‘Ellis 70′was made by a Czechoslovakian couple, Dasa and Milda Kratochvil, who set up a pottery in the backyard of their home in Abbotsford, Melbourne, in 1949 (Ford, 89-90). They marketed their pottery under the name Ellis Ceramics, a brand that was to become ubiquitous in Victoria during the 1950s and 1960s.

The designs for the Ellis moulds are extensive and varied but they are characterised by an uncompromising sturdiness that seems to reflect a European folk tradition. Having said this, I don’t know what kind of training the Kratochvils had in their home country or what influences they brought with them to Australia.