Auction catalogues

I’ve just been browsing through the catalogue for Shapiro’s forthcoming auction, Australian Studio Ceramics 1910-1990, and I was pleased to find a section at the end with pictures of many of the potters’ marks.  This will make it a useful research tool long after the pots themselves have been dispersed to new homes. How useful will depend on how easy it is for people to access it over time. Last year’s Australian studio ceramics catalogue is still on the Shapiro website, but chances are that, sooner or later,  the webmaster will need more space and suggest removing old content, or something else will happen that puts ongoing access at risk.

All of Leonard Joel’s old catalogues were lost from public view when Leonard Joel was bought by Bonhams and Goodman last year, and the website was migrated to the Bonhams and Goodman format and search software.  As a result, the links suddenly broke in my blog entry on the 2007 Marvin Hurnall auction.  Broken links may not seem very important when implementing a new website, but auction catalogues and the images they contain are primary sources for art historians, and it is sad to see them vanish so easily from view. (On the bright side, the Leonard Joel catalogues are much easier to search now.)

 

Australian pottery blogs

A recent comment on one of my posts from a Turin-based potter, inviting readers to visit his new blog, comes at an interesting time, with the Australian Ceramics discussion list talking about a web presence as one of the ways for potters to promote themselves and their works to potential buyers. The discussion list is till talking mainly about websites, but blogs are now emerging as an effective way of bringing work to new markets. The start-up cost and effort is much less and it is a nice, informal way of building up relationships with fellow makers and potential buyers on the Internet, even for potters who already have a website.

Shannon Garson, who is writing a blog for the Australian Ceramics Triennale to be held in Sydney next month, has recently posted an entry on her own blog encouraging artists to blog, and  another on how to get started.  There will also be a panel on this subject at the Triennale.  I’ve been bookmarking Australian pottery blogs in my delicious account as I find them. The numbers are still not large,  but I expect that there will be a burgeoning of new blogs over the next twelve months, and a need to make sure that these are described and safekept as part of the artistic record.

For my bookmarks, I’m single-minded in my pursuit of Australian pottery blogs, but the blogosphere is full of interesting blogs by overseas potters and by artists working in other media. I feel surprisingly connected to this larger world when an artist comments on my blog, or adds it to their blog roll. While it is not entirely good behaviour to comment on another blog solely to promote your own, I was pleased to be visited by the Turin potter, and have just paid a visit in return.

 

More galleries please

The Guildford Village Potters in Western Australia have let me know that they have a new website, and I have just added the link to my Galleries page. Doing this reminded me that I still don’t have many galleries listed for the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia or Tasmania.  I can’t believe that these states don’t have more galleries that specialise in ceramics or represent ceramic artists.  If you have a favourite gallery please let me know.

 

More on sources

This blog has a statistics page that tells me something about its users. The number one referrer is still You can find anything on the Intertubes but the figures do show that a very select audience is finding things of interest here and staying to explore links to other pages.

The statistics page also tells me what links on the blog get used. In the sidebar of the blog, there is a set of bookmarks to websites on Australian pottery. This is a feed from a del.icio.us account where I bookmark and tag websites as I find them. Almost no-one goes to the full set of bookmarks from the blog so I thought that I would say a little more about this feature and why I have included it.

My main Links page acts as a guide to reference works on Australian pottery and is very selective. The del.icio.us account aims to be a comprehensive list of links to Australian pottery websites. Rather than maintaining this as a static html page, I use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag websites as I find them.

I am constantly adding new bookmarks and would be very pleased to hear of websites that I’ve missed.

 

More on sources

Last week I spent some time browsing through the new Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (DAAO). This contains almost 7,000 biographies of Australian artists. The foundation data is drawn from existing print sources but work is already under way to add new entries. Sixteen indigenous potters are represented, reflecting the research interests of the editor-in-chief, Vivien Johnson. Apart from these, Angela Valamanesh and Peter Travis are the only contemporary potters who yet have entries. Valamanesh is there mainly because of her installation work and Travis because of his work as a designer.

DAAO is still a very young service with a forward-thinking publication model. Anyone can register as a contributor and start creating entries or adding parallel entries to flesh out the historical record. I’ve been thinking about how the daunting task of building up a body of entries for Australian potters might be achieved. Unless this is done, their representation in a resource aiming to “reflect the entire landscape and history of artistic production in Australia” may lean towards potters who ‘cross over’ through sculptural or installation work or go on to work in other media.

Postscript dated 27 September 2009

Since I wrote this, a significant number of entries for contemporary Australian potters has been added to the DAAO. Glenn R Cooke is systematically adding entries for potters represented in the Queensland Art Gallery collection, and several other contributors are raising the profile of various artists working in the ceramics medium.

 

More on sources

Geoff Ford’s Encyclopedia of Australian Potter’s Marks documents potters and potteries active before 1975 but includes marks used after this period. I thought it might be useful to provide an index of entries in the encyclopedia for potters active in the 1960s-1970s and beyond. Having marks recorded for these potters provides a good start but collectors will need to go to a wide range of other directories to cover the field.

Alexander, Doug
Ardern, Elsa
Beck, Robert
Blakebrough, Les
Bovill, Gillian
Brereton, Kevin
Carnegie, Francis
Douglas, Molly
Dunn, Phil
Englund, Ivan
Englund, Patricia
Garnsey, Wanda
Garrett, John
Gazzard, Marea
Gilbert, John
Greenaway, Victor
Halpern, Artur
Halpern, Stanislav

Halpern, Sylvia
Hick, William
Hughan, Harold
Juckert, Eric
Keys, Eileen
Laycock, Helen
Laycock, Peter
Leckie, Alex
Le Grand, Henri
Levy, Colin
Lowe, Allan
McConnell, Carl
McLaren, Gus
McLaren, Betty
McMeekin, Ivan
Memmott, Harry
Mitchell, Cynthia
Moon, Milton

Pate, Klytie
Peterkin, Les
Preston, Reg
Rushforth, Peter
Sadler, Ken
Sahm, Bernard
Sayers, Joan
Schultz, Robert A.
Shaw, Edward
Smith, Derek
Smith, Ian (SA)
Sprague, Ian
Taylor, David
Travis, Peter
Tuckson, Margaret
Warren, Peggy
Welch, Robin
Wilton, Charles

 

More on sources

In the fortieth anniversary issue of Pottery in Australia (Vol. 40, #3, 2001) there is a series of articles on the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s that surveys major trends in Australian pottery since 1962, when the journal was first published. Archived copies are available online. The authors are Frances Morgan and Karen Weiss.

A small book simply called Pottery by Janet Mansfield (Sydney : Fontana/Collins, 1986) gives a really interesting overview of what it was like to make a living as a potter in the mid 1980s through interviews with a number of practising potters.

Janet Mansfield is one of Australia’s master potters. She edited Pottery in Australia from 1976-1990 and now edits Ceramics: Art and Perception. This is an international journal and, like Craft Arts International, which is also published in Australia, reflects the surprising prominence Australia plays as a producer of arts and crafts in the global arena.

In 2004 the Melbourne gallery Skepsi on Swanston held an exhibition called Celebrating the Master. The published exhibition catalogue shows a good selection of the work of “renowned Australian ceramists” and also publishes a picture of their marks.

 

Sources

There are thousands of Australian contemporary potters and no single definitive reference work. The best place to find books on Australian pottery in general or on specific potters is Libraries Australia. Only the masters have books written about them. Information about other potters has to be gleaned from directories, exhibition and auction catalogues and book and journal indexes.

Over time the Potters’ Society of Australia has issued a number of directories of its members. These contain short biographies of the potter and, in many cases, an illustration of the potter’s mark. The society (now the Ceramics Association of Australia) stopped publishing printed directories a few years ago and now maintains an online Australian Ceramics Directory.

Many potters are not represented in the published directories. If you have a name it is always worth trying an Internet search. Some potters and potteries have a web presence – a personal website, a CV on a gallery website, a listing in eBay or another trading post or an entry in a state association or local society, business directory or travel guide. I maintain a set of bookmarks to Australian pottery websites on del.icio.us and this is growing into a useful resource for potters with a current or archived web presence. Some of this information can be quite ephemeral, however, and many potters and potteries are invisible on the Internet.

The good news is that things are improving daily. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography is now available online, for example, and this has given the Canberra potter Henri Le Grand a persistent web presence. Another emerging resource is the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online. The Powerhouse Museum has also seeded search engines with some of its records. A Google search on Reg Preston now retrieves a list of 28 items in the Museum’s collection. A number of the key journals are also publishing their indexes online, or even whole articles.

If you are really interested in Australian contemporary pottery, it is worth trying for a complete set of Pottery in Australia (now the Journal of Australian Ceramics). Back issues are regularly offered for sale through secondhand dealers. Other key journals include Ceramics: Art and Perception, Craft Australia and Craft Arts International.

Volume 29, number 2 (1990) of Pottery in Australia is a special index edition which indexes all of the issues back to the first volume in 1962. The website also has an online index for the years 2000 to date and the publishers are working on the gap years. The online index is an author/title index with short abstracts, whereas the 1990 index is more complete, listing most of the names mentioned in articles.

Art and craft journals are also indexed in services like Austart (1987 to date) and APAIS (1978 to date online but printed indexes go back to 1945). Factiva indexes Australian newspapers and Australian Art Sales Digest and Australian Art Auction Records list the prices fetched for auctioned works, although not for work changing hands through online auctions. Austart is free. The others are subscription services but you may have access through your library.

Online auction sites are also a useful source of information. Listings do not stay around for long but can provide details about an item or its provenance and pictures of potters’ marks. Australian contemporary pottery is generally listed under the Australian Pottery category on eBay, mixed up with pieces from the earlier period. Make sure you go to the Australian eBay (http://www.ebay.com.au) not the international one. OZtion, an Australian auction site, also has an Australian Pottery category.