David and I have been gradually extending our collection to include sculptural works. Amongst the many artists who live on the far south coast is our near neighbour Jenni Bourke. She is based in Narooma, where she teaches high school art, but also has a weekender here in Bemboka. Finding that Jenni was a ceramic sculptor, we decided to commission an installation for the garden. Here it is: a mushroom ring which on closer inspection is a busy fantasy world, with tiny, colourful figures going about their daily lives.

Born in England, Jenni trained in Canberra in the mid 1970s, completing a Diploma of Art at the Canberra School of Art in 1975 (specialising in sculpture), a Diploma of Education at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now Canberra University) in 1976, and a Graduate Diploma in Glaze Research and Wheel Work at the Canberra School of Art in 1978.  She creates realistic, sometimes confrontational, figurative works using clay as her preferred medium to comment on social issues. In the Bega Valley Regional Art Gallery exhibition ‘reSOURCE: The art of recycling’ held in August last year, an installation of acutely realistic babies wired up inside recycled cathode ray tubes spoke of the effects of  technology on future generations.

She turns to her fantasy work ‘for a bit of light relief’. Influenced by May Gibb’s gumnut babies, she likes to create whole environments. We responded mainly to the idea of a giant mushroom ring in the garden at first, but now find the detail extremely endearing, as do the children (and the children-at-heart) who visit the gallery.

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I am constantly being surprised by the number of large and successful pottery enterprises that operated in Australia in the late 20th century. This clock from our collection was made by the Cronulla Pottery set up by Geoff Walker and Paul Bruce on the Gold Coast in the early 1980s, first in Cronulla Avenue, Mermaid Beach, then in Burleigh Gardens. By 1996, the retail end of the business was turning over a million dollars a year.  The jewel in the crown was  Earthworks, a shop in the Chadstone Shopping Centre in Melbourne. The bubble burst in the early 2000s, with the reduction of import tarrifs finally forcing the company into liquidation in 2003.  A detailed history of the pottery can be found in Geoff Walker’s ‘My Clay Journey’ in the October 2011 issue of the Gold Coast Potter’s monthly newsletter.

Gallery cat providing operational support

If I’ve seemed a bit quiet over the last few weeks, it is because I have been upgrading the online shop software. The cats have stayed close by to provide operational support. Merran found this paisley bowl by Ian  Lamb the most comfortable place to ensconse herself near the computer, while Pippin settled for the box containing our gallery cards.

The task was a daunting one, but had to be done because the version of OsCommerce that I was using was very out-of-date and full of security holes. The software is open source and has hundreds of addons developed by the user community. I had helped myself to a number of these, so it wasn’t just a matter of installing a new version of the database and shop, but of re-applying the addons and migrating the data and images.

When I started, I wasn’t sure I had the skills to do it, but I took it slowly, diving into the forums for advice and making lots of backups. Switching to the new shop just before dinner last night was perhaps not the best idea. Full of adrenalin and fear, at least I had no problems staying up until midnight to see the new year in, as I wrestled with permissions and configuration files.

So here it is, with all the same data and URLs (I hope), and a rather neat way of displaying multiple images that came ‘out-of-the-box’ this time.

Please let me know if you find any bugs!

Visitors to our gallery usually end up spending as much time exploring the storage shelves in our workroom as they do in the carefully curated exhibition spaces. Apparently, we are following a trend in  galleries and museums to make a much larger part of the collection accessible through ‘visible storage’.

The image linked to here  is “Figure 1: 3D visualisation of ‘visible storage’ for Ceramics galleries Phase 2″ – from “Transforming the Ceramics galleries: an exercise in restraint“, Victoria Oakley and Fi Jordan,  V&A Conservation Journal, Spring 2009. In the article, the authors write:

The galleries are being developed in two phases. The first phase opens in September 2009, with 3,000 objects displayed in seven rooms.  [...] The second phase, due to open in 2010, will contrast with the first in appearance and intensity, with over twenty-six thousand objects in dense displays, evoking a ‘behind-the-scenes’  experience with areas of ‘visible storage’ where curators can work (Figure 1). A new study centre alongside the galleries will offer researchers and students the opportunity to study and handle objects.

I understand that the new galleries are open now, and would love to hear if you have visited there, or know of similar developments in Australia.

Consulting the journal literature

This vase from our collection is an excellent example of the malachite green glaze Tappin perfected during the 1980s, using cadmium and tin over a distinctive brown stoneware clay body. The band of decoration was achieved using wood and leather carving tools.

His move to the Sunshine Coast took place in the late 1980s when he established the Burrum Pottery in an old service station at Beerburrum.  The teapot below dates from that time. It is unmarked but has a Burrum Pottery paper label on its base, and the glaze is unmistakable.

(When testing the teapot for a customer this week, I found that it meets most of the criteria outlined by Peter Timms for the perfect teapot in a 1989 article reprinted in the July 2011 issue of the Journal of Australian Ceramics (pp. 98-99). Perhaps the spout could rise from a point a little further below the middle of the body for a perfect first cup.)

Cooke tells us that the malachite green glaze was developed in the later part of the 1980s and that, in the early 1980s, Tappin worked on a copper glaze which showed a blackened metallic effect. This vase currently owned by sevenshadesofblue from the Identifying Australian pottery forum looks like an example from this period.

A lidded jar posted by skiba21 has a much lighter copper glaze with a band of incised and coloured geometric decoration.

Trees

While processing images on the camera I found that David had taken this picture of the trees on our fenceline during a break in the curremt rainy weather. How lucky we are to have such a wonderful river frontage!

Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has written an insightful blog entry on this deveopment with the tag line Museum collection meets library catalogue. Surprised (and pleased) with the level of integration achieved, he says that this “signals the irreversible blending of museum and library practice in the digital space” and looks forward to increased referrals from Trove to the museum’s own site and the future sharing of user-generated tags and comments.

The museum objects fit slightly uncomfortably into the union catalogue paradigm but fine tuning of the screen presentation will soon address this.  While it seems a bit odd to talk of works and versions when referring to a one-off Mitsuo Shoji bowl, there are many unique items in libraries as well, so this is not a new problem. In such cases, information about the holding agency seems to have a greater significance, and could perhaps be brought forward to the first screen.  The work/version conceptual model will come into its own as more museum collections are added to Trove and the need is addressed to collocate records for objects produced from the same design template that are held in different collections.

Authority control remains one of the big problems for an aggregated service like Trove. The conceptual model supports the grouping of resources by and about a ‘party’ in the People and Organisations zone but the data is not always there to support this. Integrating the museum authority data with the Australian authority file used by libraries will be a big challenge but imagine how much more effective the service would be when this is done!

This is one of the areas where I see crowd sourcing coming into its own. Once there are simple ways to merge or separate ‘parties’ in  Trove and to add or remove resources from lists of works by and about a party, how could a researcher, librarian or museum curator with a little time on their hands resist the urge to do a little cleaning up?