Becoming a Wikipedia editor

I publish this blog and its content under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence. This means that other people can use the content without permission as long as the source is attributed, the use to which it is put is non-commercial, and any adaptation of the work is released under a similar license.

I  occasionally come across text from my blog quoted without attribution in other blogs, discussion forums or eBay listings. It would be nice to be acknowledged, but I try not to mind.  It is good to see information being shared, and I still get a small thrill of anonymous authorship. (Geoff Ford must feel the same.)

Recently I found a  Wikipedia article that had used my content without attribution. Anyone can edit the Wikipedia, so I took it upon myself to add a reference. While I was checking the guidelines on citing sources, I found that a blog is not a reliable source because it is not subject to independent scrutiny.  I wasn’t sure what to do next, but I felt that I had to do something.

The author had included some of my own (reliable) sources as references.  This compounded the injury. I knew that they hadn’t read them!  The rage of a violated author filled me, and then suddenly I saw it all in a different light. I was already de facto a co-author of the article. I would become one de jure. I signed in and added a reference to a key article in Pottery in Australia that had been omitted, leaving a note to explain the addition.

 

Our new life as gallery owners

We have been gallery owners for three weeks now, and the tenor of our lives has changed in subtle ways. On the days we are open, we both still take a leisurely breakfast together, sipping coffee and doing crosswords. At about 9.30 am, David washes up and tidies things away, while I drive up to the highway with the sandwich board to let visitors know where we are. Then we settle down to our various interests, with half an ear cocked to the sound of a car turning into the driveway.

It is early in the season and, so far, we have been receiving only a few visitors each day, but our lives are being enriched by new acquaintances. We are getting to know our neighbours and their weekend visitors. Friends have driven down from Canberra. Several potters have already called in, and we hope to see more as word-of-mouth spreads.

I am happy to report that the gallery seems to be a hit as a destination. The house itself is an attraction, with its large, light-filled spaces, and its views of the mountains and the trees lining the river. For those not really interested in pottery, there is still pleasure to be had in admiring our ‘grand design’, touring the displays and talking about things in general. Those really interested in the collection linger to explore our back rooms, share knowledge and reminisce.

We have made a few sales from the gallery but it is probably a good thing that we are not wholly dependent on visitors to the gallery to build up our capital for new purchases.  There are now over 200 pieces listed in our online shop, and we are starting to sell online, and to make trips to the Post Office with carefully packaged items.

In both the gallery and the online shop, we aim to be very clear about the condition of items.  After a few false starts, we have learned not to trust our database records, and to inspect each item very carefully before listing it. This handsome Eric Juckert jug, described as in good condition when we bought it on eBay in 2005, turned out to have a repair under the rim near the handle, and had to be described and priced accordingly.

One might think that undeclared damage is one of the risks of buying online, but in practice, there are protections on eBay if an item arrives ‘not as described’. By contrast, auction houses generally sell on an ‘as is’ basis, leaving the onus on buyers to inspect lots at presale viewings. This can mean some unexpected surprises for absentee bidders.

As things change hands, just as the memory of the maker may be lost, so too may be the memory of a repair, and I don’t think the seller of the Juckert jug was aware that it had been damaged. It is human nature to fix things, and to do as good a job as possible.  We bought the Garry Bish vase at the head of this entry at an exhibition at Narek Galleries in the late 1980s. It hadn’t been long in our collection before one of us knocked it over and broke the side-piece off at the neck. Of course we glued it back on, with no intention to deceive. While it stays in our collection we will continue to value it as if it were whole, but it will have to be remaindered if it is ever put up for sale.

 

Gallery news

It seems only yesterday that we decided to aim for a September opening, and now here we are.  The counter for our gallery was installed last week and suddenly everything sprang into focus.  For the first time, it really looked like a gallery, and not just a large empty room in our new house.

We’ve arranged pieces from our collection in thematic groups on furniture made for us by local joiner Michael Helmreich.  I’ve ordered brown paper bags with string handles and cream-coloured tissue paper for wrapping. A rather intimidating EFTPOS machine is sitting on the top of the counter.We have an entry on the Sapphire Coast Tourism website and our flyers have been printed and are in the mail.

All of the works on display in the gallery have also been added to our online catalogue. Or at least, they should all be there by 10.00 am on Friday. I am still busy taking photographs, making labels, swapping things around on the shelves, and sending David off to the storage container with provisions and a water bottle to rummage around in unopen boxes for just the right piece.

Our hours will be September to May, Friday| Saturday |Sunday | Monday, 10am to 5pm or by appointment. This means we will be opening our doors to visitors for the first time on Friday.

 

More travellers’ tales

This month, David and I took a break from gallery opening preparations and drove up to Sydney to visit the exhibitions associated with the Ceramics Triennale. We couldn’t get to all of them – Sydney is just too large – but we did a pretty good job in the time we had available. It is not often that we have the chance to see so much contemporary pottery, by so many makers, in one place at the one time. In fact, the last time was when the 8th National Ceramics Conference was held in Canberra in 1996.

As an aside, and for no good reason except that I can’t find this information in one place on the Internet, here are the dates and locations of all the national ceramics conferences held so far:  1st (Sydney, 1978), 2nd (Sydney, 1981), 3rd (Adelaide, 1983), 4th (Melbourne, 1985), 5th (Sydney, 1988), 6th (Brisbane, 1990), 7th (Adelaide, 1993), 8th (Canberra, 1996), 9th (Perth, 2000), 10th (Bendigo, 2003), 11th  (Brisbane, 2006), 12th aka 1st Ceramics Triennale (Sydney, 2009). I see that the next one will be in Adelaide.

We stayed on in Sydney for the Shapiro auction on 21 July and then flew up to Brisbane to pick up some pots we had bought that were too large to post. This gave us the chance to visit the new Fusions Gallery in Fortitude Vallery and Artisan just down the road. We drove back to Sydney in a rented car, calling in at Bob Connery’s Stokers Siding Pottery and Christine Ball’s Barking Dog Gallery at Uralla along the way.  Swapping back to our own car at Sydney airport, we came home via Mittagong and Canberra.

I’ve just been unwrapping our exhibition purchases and they include works by (from the left in the picture) Richard Brooks, Janna Ferris, Kenji Uranishi, Antony Brink, Janette Loughery, Cath O’Gorman, Amanda Hale, Vicki Grima, Andrew Widdis, Patsy Hely, Kirk Winter, Veronique Pengilley, Simon Reece, Gerry Wedd, and Gillian Broinowski. We also bought works by Fleur Schell, Avi Amesbury and Sandy Lockwood that we have yet to pick up.

Looking back, I see that some of our purchases were not  Triennale exhibition pieces at all. The Richard Brooks, for instance, comes from the cellar at Freeland Gallery.  Exhibitions held in ceramics galleries were enriched by, and highlighted the quality of, their other offerings. I also see that most of our purchases are small in size. This was partly because we were husbanding our capital for the Shapiro auction, and  several of the exhibitions were geared to affordable, functional work, and partly because many contemporary potters, particularly those using porcelain for the clay body, work on a domestic scale.

We enjoyed the White Heat exhibition at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, and the Earth to Form exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery, and speculated about becoming patrons of installation art, but in practice our gallery is domestic in scale too, and so is our budget. When David showed signs of wanting to take Gudrun Klix’s On the Table home, I dragged him in to a nearby booth to watch Pip McManus’s  Ichor and he had returned to his senses when we emerged half an hour later.

Two poignant exhibitions celebrated the work of recently deceased potters: Alan Peascod: influences and dialogue at the National Art School in Darlinghurst, and Gillian Broinowski: a celebration of form at Sturt Gallery in Mittagong. The Peascod exhibition was a retrospective one, exhibiting some quite wonderful pieces from public and private collections. The Broinowski exhibition was of recent work, left in her studio, following her death in November 2008.

We found the venues for these two exhibitions of great interest and enjoyed their ambience and historical associations. The National Art School is located in the old Darlinghurst Gaol site, which was converted to the East Sydney Technical College in 1921.  NAS  was at first part of the technical college, but, after some difficult times, has operated as an independent entity since 1996. Many Australian potters are alumni of ESTC/NAS. Sturt has also been a centre of excellence for Australian pottery since Ivan McMeekin established the Sturt Pottery in 1953, and we always enjoy stopping to visit the gallery there  on our way to or from Sydney and Canberra.

 

New website

We have been in our new house for five months now, and we are enjoying the benefits of north-facing windows and double-glazing as winter sets in. While initially we had hoped to have the gallery open by March, we now plan to do so in September. This will give us three months more to set all the things in place that are needed to open a working gallery, including a counter, payment facilities, flyers and signage.

David assigned to me the task of setting up a new website for the gallery and this is now done. (I have added a link to it in the sidebar.) The aim of the website is to help people find the gallery and to see what is currently on exhibition there. I will continue to post entries here about known and mystery potters, and musings on other pottery-related matters that come to mind.

Our next priority is to decide what to display first from among the many thousands of pieces we have stockpiled over the last four years. Some of the themes that are starting to emerge are identified on the  exhibitions page on the website. The ‘tag cloud’ of names on this page is designed to reflect the diversity of makers in our collection, and the numbers of items we hold by each potter. I must admit to increasing the font size of some of the  names! We may only have a few pieces by Hiroe Swen, for instance, but they have a significant place in our collection.

The image shows two hand-made bottles with flattened profiles by Swen that we bought last year from Gallery East in North Fremantle. The one on the left (2o cm high) is called ‘Fluidity of movement’ and the one on the right (17 cm high)  ‘Ocean dwellers’. They are both marked Hiroe Swen (painted) and also impressed with her English and Japanese  seals.

 

The beauty of small pots

As we unpack pottery and find places for each piece in our new work room, I keep being surprised by the beauty of small pots. Here is a sample that I’ve gathered from the shelves. The tallest, at 13 cm high, is the Taggerty Pottery spill vase on the left, with its characteristic landscape decoration and surprisingly monumental form. The richly-lustred Andrew Gibson vase third from the left is also monumentally conceived. The baluster form is usually reserved for a much larger vase. I find both vases to be disarmingly small and like the way in which they can be cupped in one hand.

The Phillip McConnell vase second from the right doesn’t invoke the same response. Although it has McConnell’s impressed mark and some fine sgraffito decoration, it looks like a sample, with the clay too thick, the glaze too thin and the mark too large, for a fully-conceived form. It is only 7 cm high but the Chris Sanders vase next to it on the right is even smaller and yet seems to me to work better as a finished piece, or as a model for a larger one.

Second from the left, the Sylvia Halpern bud vase with its dry glaze is perfectly proportioned.  The thin neck with its slightly ragged lip completes the ovoid form in a very satisfactory way. A bud vase is small by definition and it is hard to imagine this piece being any other size. Fourth from the left the tiny goblet made by Victor Greenaway, with its peach fuzz glaze and unglazed flanged stem, is one of a set of four meant for use as liqueur glasses. Its size is thus directly related to its function. This is also true of the little Kevin White beaker next to it, which could be used as a shotglass. However, we bought it solely for the beauty of its decoration.

From this sample, it seems that potters make small pots for a variety of reasons: to be fit for purpose; to meet the needs of tourists wanting something that they can take home in their luggage; to give collectors with small budgets an opportunity to own a representative example; to test clays or glazes or ideas for a larger piece. And, of course, some potters simply express their ideas best in small forms.

 

The lovelier distance is ahead

Yesterday was my birthday. David’s is next Monday.  (We are the same age but he likes to think of himself as the younger man.) This year we both have a special reason for celebration. Our new house is finished and we will be moving in on the weekend. In the evening, we walked down to the block for the second time that day. The builders were still there, staying late to work on all the small things still needing to be done. “Ducks on the pond”, one called, for perhaps the last time.

They left us to lock up and we lingered to wander through the empty rooms. Afterwards, I stood at the picture window in the gallery, watching the eucalypts lining the river as they danced in the wind of a summer thunderstorm that had just descended into the valley. My heart swelled with emotion. The builders have done a wonderful job and it is a beautiful house that I hope we can enjoy together for many years.  We are  not in our first youth and time races for us now, but at that moment I felt that “the lovelier distance is ahead”. (As you can see, I’ve been dipping into  Judith Wright. This is from The Moving Image.)

Just then, David called me to discuss the more immediate problem of how we were going to get back for tea. It had begun to rain in earnest and the walk is an 800 metre up-hill slog on a gravel road now slippery with rain.  Luckily our neighbour and her daughter had come down in their car to feed the horses that they are having agisted in the paddock next door. We hitched a ride and settled down for the evening in our other home, its rooms made familiar by the overflow of our belongings. We have enjoyed living here but now it is time to move on.

 

Collective intelligence

Over the last four years, David and I have acquired a number of  slipcast pieces on eBay marked ‘Gunde’ or ‘Gunda’ that stand out, like Ellis, for their modernist design. Until recently, little was known about this pottery except that it was active in Melbourne in the 1950s and 60s.

This 24 cm high vase with matt black glaze and geometric enamelled decoration marked ‘Gunda 18′ is similar to work produced by the Latvian potter, Maigonis Daga, while he was living in Adelaide after the war. Daga later moved to the United States and made a name for himself there. Prices realised for Gunda on eBay went up for a time, as buyers and sellers speculated that these were Daga’s early work.

Members of the Australian eBay Collectables & Antiques forum became fascinated with the issue and started to share knowledge about Gunda and Daga that they had gathered as dealers and collectors (“Australian Pottery Gunda & Maigon Daga“, 03-03-07 –).  The forum had just agreed from the existing evidence that Gunda and Daga were not the same person (although sharing common West German influences) when ‘Dora’ posted an entry saying that Gunda was Gundars Lusis, a Latvian migrant born in 1928 who had migrated to Australia  with his parents in 1949.

Ross Waterman, a Gunda collector and member of the forum, has now published an excellent article, Discovering Gunda, in Craft Victoria’s Craft Culture 2008. This article draws on the ‘collective intelligence’ of the eBay forum and the author’s own research to provide a first assessment of Lusis as a potter. Waterman was able to contact Lusis’ family, friends and neighbours to flesh out the information gleaned from migration records and the evidence of the works themselves.

The  post-war potteries in Melbourne do not yet have a historian as Sydney does with Dorothy Johnston’s The People’s Potteries but this article shows what can be achieved by tapping the memories of people living and working in Melbourne at the time. There is still much to be learnt; and not a lot of time left to collect the stories waiting to be told.

 

More travellers’ tales

My consultancy work took me to San Francisco last week to attend a workshop on the use of technology in arts and humanities research. While there, I visited the De Young Museum and stumbled across the Dorothy and George Saxe collection of contemporary craft. The Saxes are a San Francisco couple who, looking for something to do in 1980 after their children had left home,  decided to amass the best collection possible of contemporary glass; then extended their collecting interests to ceramics, wood, fibre and metal (1).

Amongst the ceramics on display were several pieces by Peter Voulkos (1924-2002). Back home, looking for  information about Voulkos, I found a website devoted to documenting his work in the form of a catalogue raisonné.  This type of scholarship is unusual in the crafts but Voulkos has an iconic status in the history of American ceramics and his large-scale, sculptural works bridge the divide between art and craft. [In Australia, his work may have influenced ceramic sculptors like Peter Travis, Bernard Sahm, Joan Campbell and Marea Gazzard to look beyond the Anglo-Oriental tradition (2).]

The Voulkos website has a “Quest” section that includes information about known works and seeks help to identify the whereabouts of works that have been lost.  The catalogue raisonné is being published as it grows, and the reach of the quest extends to anyone looking for information about Voulkos on the Internet. This resonated with the theme of the workshop I had just attended, where we had been exploring not only how to make things easier to do through the use of technology, but also how to do things that could not have been done before.

Notes

1. Janet Silver Ghent, “Crafting a better marriage: South Bay couple revels in transformative power of art“, The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, 26 October, 2007.

2. Frances Morgan, “The 60s“, Pottery in Australia, Issue 40 #3 Sept 2001.

 

Marking time with Martin Boyd

We have been living in Bemboka for seven months now, marking time in a rented house while our new house and gallery is being built. I say marking time but in practice the months are speeding by. We spend part of each day buying and cataloguing stock for the gallery and learning about Australian potters and their marks. To build up some extra capital, we have each taken on part-time consultancy work. This keeps us busy at the computer for a couple of days a week and takes us quite often on the road.

When we are at home, we visit the block almost every day. Seeing the house plans take three-dimensional form is fascinating. There are always decisions to be made and we are deep into plans for the garden as well. The block slopes down to the Bemboka river. On our side a backwater is separated from the main flow by an island choked with blackberry and honeysuckle. We have taken on the challenge of eradicating these interlopers and spend hours on the island armed with riggers’ gloves, fire rakes and secateurs.

When not engaged in more energetic activities, my favourite way of marking time is to sit on the north-facing back veranda of our rented house overlooking the mountains, with my feet up on a chair, reading. We are both catching up on Australian authors and our latest find has been Martin Boyd. I have just finished Lucinda Brayford , the Langton quartet (The Cardboard Crown, Outbreak of Love, A Difficult Young Man and A Blackbird Sings) and the Montforts.

Full of wit and poignancy, these novels deal with early Melbourne life, what it was to be a well-heeled Anglo-Australian in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the breakdown of authority during the first world war.  The scenes set in Heidelberg, Warrandyte and the Dandenongs evoke the raw beauty of the Australian landscape that has drawn us to Bemboka and me to my seat here on the veranda.

When Lucinda Brayford was published in 1946 Martin Boyd had been living in England for twenty-five years.  The novel was an immediate success there, and in the United States, but when he returned to Australia in 1948, he found that his nephews were better known. “In Sydney”, writes Brenda Niall, “Guy and David had established a business which, without consulting their uncle, they called the Martin Boyd Pottery. There were no accolades for Lucinda Brayford. Instead, Martin Boyd was asked how he found time for writing as well as pottery” (The Cardboard Crown, Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2004, p. viii).

The Langton Quartet and the Montforts each rework the story of the Boyd family in different ways. Martin’s older brother Merric inspired some aspects of the characters of Dominic and Jacko but Merric’s interest in pottery does not feature in any of the novels. This may have been because Martin did not continue the story of the Langtons beyond the end of the first world war. However, I think that he was also less interested in pottery than in painting or drawing as ways of manifesting the artistic impulse. In his 1965 autobiography, he describes Merric’s career as a potter in the following words:

…my sister-in-law spent forty years as the strength and stay of her husband and children, the former filled with creative passion, and desperately anxious to provide for his family, but with an unaccountable aversion to making any work of art when once he had been told that it was saleable. At least this is what dealers in Melbourne have told me. He was the first person in Australia to cast individual hand-made pottery and to bake it himself. He worked harder than any of my family, in fact harder than anyone I have known, sitting up all night attending to his kiln, with the added mental strain of anxiety as to the result of the burning, which finally injured his health; and for all this he had a negligible reward. In his obituary notice he was described as :the father of Australian pottery” (Day of my Delight, Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1974, p.50).

I was amused to read in the autobiography (p.241) that Martin Boyd also had problems with blackberry during the three years he spent in Australia at the Grange, Harkaway, his mother’s childhood home. He resorted to a spray but hated seeing “the beautiful young shoots not fallen to the axe, but hanging sick and poisoned”. Sixty years later, this plant “introduced in the early days to make Australia home-like” is as much a pest as ever and we feel no such distress wielding our spray guns.

Postscript

I read in a fact sheet produced by Bega Agricultural Services today that blackberry was actually imported from Germany to stablise erosion in gullies exposed by farmers as they cleared Gippsland’s open forests.