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!

 

Known potter #14: Penne Jefford

Canberra is an inland city and in summer its residents escape to the coast, a 145 kilometre drive across the tableland through Bungendore and Braidwood, then down Clyde Mountain to Bateman’s Bay. Over the years we have often made the trek to join family and friends there. In the early 1990s, while taking a break at Braidwood, we found an exhibition of Penne Jefford’s work at Studio Altenberg.

Jefford is a Queensland artist who began potting in 1978 and opened her own gallery on Mount Tamborine in 1986. In 1989 she returned to potting full-time, setting out to create a new body of work inspired by ancient civilisations.

The pieces we saw at Braidwood were stoneware vessels that had been assembled from thrown and carved forms and decorated using lustre and gold leaf. We were amazed to see works of such sophistication and originality in a regional gallery. We continued our journey with one of the smaller and more affordable examples. Some way down the road, we turned the car around, went back and exchanged it for the one illustrated here.

Our piece is 42 cm high and rises like a reliquary from a two-ringed gilded base. The strongly rounded body has been airbrushed a midnight blue dusted with stars and decorated with abstract ritualistic designs. The neck with its carved extrusions is similar to a more elaborate work entitled ‘Shogun’ illustrated in Douglas Cameron’s article on Jefford (”Of myths and rituals”, Craft Arts International, no. 25, 1992, pages 68-70). Our piece is slightly earlier (the base is inscribed ‘PJ 90′) and the cultural references less explicit.

We’ve always been surprised not to encounter Jefford’s work again but she started painting soon after completing this body of work and now focuses her artistic energy and interest in past cultures almost entirely on two-dimensional media (Redcliffe Bayside Herald, 5 January 2005).

 

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.

 

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.

 

Known potter #13: John Dermer

Last weekend David and I made the long trip from Canberra to Yackandandah in north-eastern Victoria to attend John Dermer’s 30th annual exhibition. This porcelain salt-glazed teapot was amongst the 40 pieces on exhibition (one for each year that he has been potting). It is one of only a few teapots that he has ever successfully salt-glazed “because they usually fail!”.

Dermer was born in Melbourne in 1949. He completed formal studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1970 and set up his first kiln in his parent’s backyard. In 1971 he traveled to Europe and North America, working for a time at Josiah Wedgwood & Sons in England. On his return to Australia in 1973 he completed a Diploma of Education and established a kiln at Eltham. Then in 1975 he set up Kirby’s Flat Pottery in Yackandandah and has lived and worked there ever since.

Last year Dermer was awarded the Salzbrand Keramik 2006 prize for his salt-glazed ceramics. He sees this as “the culmination of a 40 year love/hate relationship with the process of salt-glazing” (2007, page 101). Salt-glazing is a form of decoration where salt is added to a kiln at the end of a firing. It volatilises and fluxes with the silicas in the unglazed clay surface, creating a glassy translucent effect with a slightly ‘orange-peel’ texture. The process is very unforgiving but it is also addictive because it can produce rewarding and unexpected results. With this award Dermer has become an internationally-recognised master of the process.

This year one of the targets we set ourselves was to get better acquainted with Dermer’s work and to add some of his pieces to our collection. We bought this simple thrown form with flattened sides on our first visit to the pottery in March. It shows the degree of control that Dermer has been able to achieve over the salt-glazing process, using inscribed line and pattern on a smooth flashed surface to evoke aspects of the Australian landscape. The teapot is quite different in style. The orange-peel effect has been accentuated using iron and cobalt oxides to create an intricate pattern over the white porcelain surface that envelops and articulates the teapot form.

Dermer also decorates pieces using the terra sigillata process, a way of creating a silky smooth finish by applying a coating of microfine clay to a once-fired pot. He first used this technique to make a series of large vessels for New Parliament House in Canberra in 1988. He wraps the pots in a ceramic blanket encasing salt, oxides and casuarina branches for the second firing. The branch atomises, leaving a shadowy imprint.

In 1995 Dermer was commissioned to make six platters for sale during the 1996 Turner exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. Turner’s paintings of the Houses of Parliament burning and of loading coals at night inspired him to experiment with the oil-spot and tomato red glazes that are combined in this large (32 cm high) spherical vase. The oil spot collar and rust colour lend it a sombreness which then surprises with flashes of red. This piece was made in 1997, just before Dermer stopped selling his work from outlets other than his own studio. We bought it at Berrima Galleries in 2006. I’m not sure where it had been in the meantime.

Dermer’s exhibition pieces have three and four figure prices that reflect the trials involved in making them and the quality of the result. He also makes a production range that is more affordable for non-collectors. He marks his exhibition pieces with his initials using an impressed stamp or signs them with his inscribed name. Production pieces like this platter are stamped with the Kirby’s Flat Pottery mark. (A number of these are now turning up on eBay.)

As well as making pots, Dermer is a keen photographer. The desert and escarpment regions of central and northern Australia are sources of inspiration for both his ceramic and photographic work.

Sources

A full CV is available from Dermer’s website.

• John Dermer, “40 years on”, Ceramics: art and perception, no.69, 2007: 101-103.
• John Dermer, “A lifetime of salt-glazing”, Ceramics: art and perception, no.57, 2004: 89-92.
• Mary Lou Jelbart, “John Dermer: aligned to the land”, Ceramics: art and perception, no.20, 1995: 72-74.
• John Dermer, Burnt earth, the journey, Yackandandah, Vic. : J. Dermer, [1992].
• April Hersey, “John Dermer “, Craft Australia, no.3, Spring 1980: 24-25.

 

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)?

 

Known potter #12: Milton Moon

This medium-sized (23 cm in diameter) stoneware bowl with pale matt glaze and delicate brushwork decoration is inscribed on the base ‘Milton Moon’.

Milton Moon is possibly the most recognised name in Australian contemporary pottery and his works attract a great deal of attention at auction and on eBay. Prices achieved range from $100-$800 depending on size and condition, with a large bowl fetching a hammer price of $1,700 at the Shapiro auction we attended earlier this year.

Moon was born in 1926 in Melbourne. Like most young men of his generation, his life was interrupted by war. Settling in Brisbane in 1949, he worked in radio and television and trained for a while as a painter while also pursuing an early interest in pottery through his friendship with Harry Memmott. In 1959 he set up a studio at Tarragindi, Brisbane. He was mostly self-taught but learnt wheel-throwing from Mervyn Feeney, a discipline that he passed on to his students at the Department of Technical Education in Queensland (1962-1969) and the School of Art in Adelaide (1969-1975).

Our bowl was made in the late 1970s or early 1980s after he had retired from teaching and was potting full-time at Summertown in the Adelaide Hills. Descriptions of work done at this time (”Milton Moon”, 1981) indicate that the glaze is nepheline syenite, the brushwork is done with oxides and it was reduction-fired in a gas kiln. Its restraint and simplicity, the slight alteration of the wheel-thrown form and the delicacy of the decoration reflect the Japanese Zen aesthetic which pervades this stream of Moon’s work. In the 12 months since we bought this piece it has given us daily pleasure.

Not all of his pieces are like this. Much of his work is stronger, bolder, more exuberant and perhaps less immediately approachable. Moon has been experimenting throughout his life as a potter with ways of achieving an Australian aesthetic in his pottery, influenced by the sense of an ancient spirit that he found first in the east coast rainforests, then in the bare bones and aridness of the South Australian outback. Some of these pots may need to be lived with for a long time to understand what the potter was striving to express.

We don’t yet own one of these tougher works. Moon has been a prolific exhibitor but he has only had two solo exhibitions in Canberra, both at Solander Gallery in 1976 and 1988, and we missed these. Now we keep our eye out for Milton Moon pieces but the competition is strong and the prices high. Also, there are so many directions in which we might invest our limited collecting budget. We went to the Shapiro auction to buy our first Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and had to watch four Milton Moons go to other bidders.

Moon’s exhibition works are all marked with the potter’s full signature but he also made many pots for sale from his gallery at Summertown. This small stoneware dish with hand-painted pansies is an example. He signed these pieces with a simple incised ‘M’ characterised by a long first stem.

There are other potters with these initials and it is definitely a case of ‘buyer beware’ in the market place. Sellers finding a piece inscribed ‘M’ or’MM’ and referring to Geoff Ford’s Encyclopedia of Australian potters’ marks (page 167) may jump too readily to the conclusion that it was made by Milton Moon, in the hope of making a good sale. This is sad for both the collector and the potter.

Sources

A good way of getting an overall feeling for Milton Moon and his work is to spend an hour browsing through the images and accompanying notes on the potter’s website. The CV on the website is also very complete. Listed below in date order are some of the other sources I found useful when preparing this entry:

• Focus on Milton Moon / Dennis Pryor. [St. Lucia, Qld.] : University of Queensland Press, 1967.
• “Milton Moon” in Australian pottery / [by] Kenneth Hood and Wanda Garnsey ; Photographs by Douglas Thompson. South Melbourne, Vic. : Macmillan, 1972, pages 104-111, plates 78-84.
• “Milton Moon” in The Potter’s art : an Australian collection / edited by Janet Mansfield ; photographs by Douglas Thompson. North Ryde, N.S.W. : Cassell Australia, 1981, page 40.
• “Milton Moon: A strengthening of tradition” in Ceramics in South Australia, 1836-1986 : from folk to studio pottery / by Noris Ioannou. Adelaide : Wakefield Press, 1986, pages 333-335.
• Noris Ioannou, “Milton Moon’s Australian aesthetic”, Ceramics: art and perception, issue 2, 1990, pages 48-51.
• Milton Moon retrospective / Christopher Menz. Adelaide : Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1991.
• “A conversation with Milton Moon on approaching the intangible” [Interview by Osborne, Margot.] Artlink, volume 26, number.4, 2006: pages (62)-65.
• The Zen Master, the potter & the poet / by Milton Moon. Stepney, S. Aust. : Axion Publishing, c2006.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Known potter #11: Pippin Drysdale

This small (14 x 15 cm) perfectly thrown bowl with parabolic form has an intense orange interior bound into a radial cellular pattern by fine dark lines and lustre accents. The pattern continues on the outside as an undulating band below which flow striated lines of muted colour. The small unfooted base is marked Pippin Drysdale ‘95.

Pippin Drysdale is an internationally renowned potter based in Fremantle, Western Australia. She was born in Melbourne in 1943 but spent her childhood in Perth and returned there to live in 1972. She came late to potting, graduating from the Perth Technical College in 1982 and then obtaining a Bachelor of Arts from the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) in 1986.

At WAIT (now Curtin University of Technology) she became interested in design and experimented with painting onto clay slabs. Later she returned to the bowl shape as the form through which she could best explore the use of resist techniques and coloured lines and planes to evoke a sense of landscape. By 1995 she was working as a mature artist and achieving strong critical acclaim. She had exhibited at Narek Gallery here in the ACT in 1989 and 1992 but we had missed these exhibitions and were not particularly aware of her work.

I come from Perth and go back often to see my family. In 1995 David was with me and my sister and I took him to Fremantle for fish and chips at Cicerellos, a visit to the Fremantle Arts Centre in the old female asylum building and a walking tour of the back streets of the city. There we stumbled quite by accident on The Door Gallery and Drysdale’s solo exhibition of seventy works from her new Pinnacle series. We were enthralled and ran from room to room, knowing that just one of these pots was to go home with us and trying to choose which one.

When we go together to an exhibition somehow we always end up finding one piece that we both agree is the nicest. Price was a factor so we scorned the larger pieces, finding them showy. Amongst the more modest pieces that had not already been sold, this one stood out for us because of the intense colour inside the bowl, how this is constrained by the network of lines and the expressionist outside surface.

Back in Perth this August for family reasons we found that we had just missed an exhibition of Drysdale’s work at the John Curtin Gallery . The exhibition coincided with the launch of a new book on the artist (Ted Snell, Pippin Drysdale, Lines of Site, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2007). We were able to buy a copy of this book and found it enriching to know more about our piece and how it had been made.

Drysdale has her own website and continues to explore and refine new ideas in her Tanami Traces series with the help of collaborator Warwick Palmeteer who throws pots to her design.