Mystery potter #17: EL (?)

This jug with its three matching goblets is inscribed on the base with the initials ‘EL’ (?). We bought it as a set on eBay last month. The seller, who comes from Brisbane, thinks that it was made in Queensland. None of the three ‘EL’ potters in my database (Emily Laszuk, Elva Linnemann and Elizabeth Lyon) seem likely candidates. Laszuk (formerly Emily Stackman) and Lyon are well-established potters based in NSW and WA respectively. Linnemann, who won the Walker Ceramic Award cash prize in 1986, trained at the Tasmanian School of Art.

Hundreds of such sets are listed on eBay each year and many more must still reside in kitchen cupboards or dressers. We bought this one (which may once have had six goblets) because of its distinctive style. It is made out of white clay and glazed a dusky speckled pink that looks like porphyry. The ivory glaze on the inside of the goblets cuffs the rim with a visually pleasing irregular line. The jug, which is shaped like a ewer, is half-glazed in the same ivory colour and has a carved band of decoration where the two colours join.

Goblets formed part of the repertoire of almost every potter with a production line in the 1970s and 1980s. In their simplest form they are easy to make (without problematic handles) and must have sold well too. Whether customers actually used them is another question, but I can attest that a well-made goblet can lead to a good drinking experience. While our furniture was on its way to Bemboka, David and I spent the night in the house we are renting with a bottle of red wine and a set of Malcolm Cooke Cuppacumbalong goblets that we had just found at the Canberra tip shop. Like the ‘EL’ goblets, they were comfortable to hold and made an interesting change from glass.

 

Mystery potter #15: M in octagon

We bought this large (45 cm diameter) platter from a Melbourne auction house in 2005. It is decorated in muted tones in a triangular pattern using a glaze-over-glaze technique. The mark is an impressed M in an octagon. I don’t know anything else about the potter.

It must be challenging to throw a platter this large. It creates a relatively flat surface for decoration that brings out the painter in the potter. In this case, the ragged painterly edges of the triangular motifs and the transition from light to dark creates an interesting sense of movement within the bounds of the circular form.

 

Mystery potter #15: PPP with map of Australia

This white stoneware mug with pale celadon glaze and waratah decoration is marked with the impressed stamp PPP next to a map of Australia. In style it alludes to a long tradition of functional stoneware with Australian floral motifs but the wedged shape, the extreme paleness of the glaze and the pink stamens in low relief lend it a post-modern feel. There is a deftness to this piece that makes me surprised that I can’t identify the mark. It was one of four bought on eBay in 2005 from a Sydney seller and that is all I know about the provenance.

The initials PPP will resonate with Australian collectors because they stand for Premier Pottery Preston and were used in the form of a black underglaze stamp from 1929-1933 on Remued pieces. The two contemporary potteries that I can find with these initials - Poole’s Pony Pottery and Pumpkin Patch Pottery - seem unlikely candidates.

Peter Pilven, who lectures in ceramics at the University of Ballarat, signs his works Pilven or Peter Pilven. Pat Pearson, a potter active on the north coast of NSW in the 1980s, signed her work with a P in a triangle or her full name. Peter Petruccelli, who worked as a potter from 1968 to 1997, signed his ceramic pieces Petruccelli or stamped them Petruccelli Ceramics UBeaconsfield (for Upper Beaconsfield, Victoria). I don’t have marks recorded for Peter Pine, an Armidale NSW potter with an entry in the 1981 directory, or for Pat Pennington, a Leura NSW potter with an entry in the 1990 directory.

This puts paid to potters with the initials PP. I give up when it comes to places. At least I know that it is an Australian mark!

 

Mystery potter #14: Kirkpatrick

This small (13 cm high) bottle has been hand built using folds of clay. The roughly textured and stained body looks like weathered rock and the shape is irregular and flattened on one side. The perfectly turned and glazed tenmoku neck thus comes as a surprise. Inscribed on the base is the name ‘Kirkpatrick’.

I like this pot so much that I’ve used it in the header to my blog. It reminds me of turned pieces of wood that I’ve seen with the body left unworked to expose the naturally occurring form. Only in this case, the clay took this shape after it had been formed by the potter and it became rock after it had been fired.

I’d be interested to see more work by this potter, whose name I haven’t been able to find in any of the published sources.

 

Mystery potter #13: M

This 18 cm high, brown stoneware bottle has a thickly applied copper glaze that has been allowed to drip down the body leaving part of the clay bare. The body is short and stocky with a ridged transition to the conical neck. Where copper ions have formed in the crystal during firing, the glaze is a dark red colour punctuated in places with pin holes. At its thickest it is volcanic in texture with a mud colour that matches the brown of the clay. Elsewhere, the more thinly applied glaze has lost its copper and reduced to an opalescent and finely crazed surface that allows the grogging in the clay to show through. The base is inscribed with what looks like a loosely drawn M.

We bought this bottle from a Melbourne auction house in 2006, believing its maker to be Milton Moon. I now have it on the potter’s authority that it isn’t one of his. And here is an interesting dilemma. Our bottle manifests all of the wrong ways of applying a copper glaze if you want a perfect red colour. Knowing its potter, we had confidence that this was deliberate. The uncompromising partly-exposed brown stoneware body and the way the glaze has been manipulated to fold around the neck like a shawl and drip in thick pendants at the base seemed assured. Do we change our view now that we know it was made by mystery potter #13 (M)?

 

Mystery potter #12: Le?

This small (7 x 12 cm) domed vessel on a raised base is glazed an intense blue on the inside. By contrast the unglazed outside surface is worked to look like a weathered carapace or shell. It is heavy to the hand and there is something organic about the ragged opening edged in burnt orange, the strange shunt next to it and the hidden beauty of the interior. On the base is an impressed seal which reads ‘Le’.

This pot shares a provenance with the one made by Mystery Potter #3. We bought them both from the same seller. Mystery Potter #3 has a mark very similar to the one used by the New Zealand potter Lindsay Bedogni, as recorded in PottersMarks.co.nz. I wondered for a short time if this pot might also have a New Zealand connection. Lawrence Ewing, another New Zealand potter, does use ‘LE’ as a mark but his monogram is different.

Australian potters with the initials ‘LE’ include Liz Eakins, Linda Ewin, Louisa Edge and Laura Ellis. I don’t have marks recorded for these potters and couldn’t find any stylistic connections when looking at examples of their work.

And of course, this mark may not be ‘Le’ at all. David just walked by and thought it was ‘LB’. And now I’m wondering if it is ‘Ce’. Never mind. While looking for examples of Linda Ewin’s work, I found a cache of regional NSW potters on the Orana Arts website and have added them to my database.

 

Mystery potter#11: Anthill Pottery (?)

This large (22 cm) bowl with flared sides and blue-green glaze is finished on the inside with bands of incised decoration. The maker’s name is inscribed on the base. I’ve recorded it as Anthill Pottery for want of a better guess. I can only find one mention of an Anthill Pottery - a website (probably not Australian) with no content that was set up in 2004.

I don’t have any more information to add about the origins of this bowl so I thought I would say something about its foot ring. A foot ring is an area at the base of a pot that some potters add to give stability. It also provides a low pedestal from which the main form can spring. In this bowl the foot ring has been glazed, creating a continuity of colour as the profile changes. The area under the bowl where the name is inscribed is also glazed and the base of the foot ring is trimmed and beveled to form a white circle the colour of the clay body.

Well-executed bases that explore the relationship between the form and the clay body are a signature of contemporary pottery, unlike the base of this much earlier blue-green jug with twisted handle by another mystery potter, “Scott”.

 

Mystery potter #10: C

This spherical vase is only 10 cm (4 inches) high but it has a great deal of charm and assurance. The straw coloured body is painted freehand with burnt orange bands separated by thin brown lines. The interior is glazed a dark brown. This colour is also echoed on the two counterpoised curving arms. The base is faintly inscribed 13/4/95. The only other distinguishing mark is a painted ‘C’ that may have been added later. It was recently acquired and, apart from the date, I have no idea of its provenance.

 

Mystery potter #9: Tricuspid

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?

 

Mystery potter #8: Old Ballarat Pottery

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.