MUCH IN COMMON NOTHING ALIKE

26 MAY – 15 JUNE 2023

Officially opened by: Colin Walker – Director, Art Gallery of Western Australia

Much in Common, Nothing Alike celebrates the immense contribution of three Australian ceramic artists, Pippin Drysdale, Jeffery Mincham AM and Warrick Palmateer. The timing is no accident, with Drysdale celebrating her 80th birthday in May and continuing to excite collectors and set the (ceramic) stage into her next decade.

Landscape, landscape and landscape are the common threads for these three doyens of the Australian and international ceramic world. From there, they are indeed “Nothing Alike”!

Drysdale will show recent work alongside work by her longtime wheel thrower, Warrick Palmateer, an exceptional artist in his own right, and by her dear colleague, Jeff Mincham, a major figure in Australian ceramics for over 40 years and a key mentor to her.

Jeffery Mincham returns to Perth for the first time in twelve years, to show a superb range of new works, some over 70 cm high, such as ‘Of Land and Sky and Ever-Changing Things’ (hand-built ceramic) including platters, mid-sized vessels and small, highly sought-after Tea Bowls.

Mincham is a Master of Australian Craft and a Living Treasure since 2009, a Fellow of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation and Member of the Order of Australia. He expresses his personal language through mid-fired textural ceramics, hand-coiled and frequently imposing in scale, the vehicles for his evocative interpretation of landscape in the Adelaide Hills, mostly experienced from his Cherryville studio and the adjacent Fleurieu Peninsula where he grew up on the edge of The Coorong.

“Art” says Jeff Mincham, “is humankind’s really big idea – with endless benefits to the community.”

Lisa Cahill, CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Design Centre, describes him as “one of Australia’s pre-eminent ceramic artists, who has been a stalwart advocate for craft for many decades. His monumental works evoke a deep painterly respect for the Australian landscape but, ever the raconteur, as he said in a recent interview with me, ‘bugger painting’, his love is the clay.”

Mincham finds abstraction intriguing. ‘Wild at Heart’ (46x36x15cm) continues his investigation of the Japanese Oribe ware ceramic tradition. “Inspiration for my work has long been sourced in the landscape and the natural world, with the drift towards greater degrees of abstraction being almost irresistible.”1 In the 1600s the Japanese were thinking about tea bowls in ways that relate to our contemporary view of abstract expressionism, re-ordering visual experiences and turning them into something else, something entirely new. “This,” says Mincham, “is the big game of being an artist, putting before people something that is entirely new in its form and shape.”2

His election as a National Living Treasure in 2009 and the extensive touring exhibition that followed opened up an intensive period of work and allowed him to clarify his ideas about what he would be doing and why. Nearly fifteen years on, after multiple solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, his work is again on tour with the Australian Design Centre’s exhibition, SIXTY: The Journal of Australian Ceramics 60th Anniversary 1962–2022.

A practicing potter for over thirty-five years, Warrick Palmateer has a deep understanding of the properties of clay. His beach-combing youth, passion for surfing and sensitivity to the changing nature of local beaches and coastlines have consistently informed his art practice. The colours, light, motion and form always beckon with something new.

Palmateer has made a habit of working collaboratively with other artists, especially Pippin Drysdale, throwing her porcelain vessels and marbles for thirty years. Their major survey exhibition, Confluence, at the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University in 2018, highlighted their very different practices. Palmateer’s vessels, thrown at a colossal scale, were formed from brick clay mined in the Perth Hills and also referenced his coastal home, in stark contrast to the minimalist porcelain installations by Drysdale.

In 2023, with his new studio nearing completion, Palmateer is again turning to the rhythm, movement and textures of the Western Australian coastline for inspiration. “I have always regarded myself as a wheel thrower, so my new work is based on wheel throwing with texture expressively applied and colour intuitively rendered to suggest the rugged and fragile beauty of the ocean and coast, the light, shade and movement of beach and water that has defined me from an early age.” Palmateer enjoys working large though concedes that his new work will not be on the scale of the Confluence exhibition.

Warrick’s enthusiasm is as infectious as his down-to-earth approach: “No matter how well you think you know your kiln, your clay, your materials, they can bite and bite hard – it keeps potters humble!” Recent health problems have restricted his art practice, but the new studio and participation in this exhibition signal new doors opening and collectors will be lining up.

Pippin Drysdale has been a remarkable figure in Australian ceramic art for over four decades, working from her Fremantle studio with a collaborative team, especially Warrick Palmateer. Few Australians have seen their work so extensively exhibited, collected nationally and internationally and held in important public collections and museums around the world.

Drysdale works intuitively, driven by her passion to create. She draws on assimilated experiences of place, topography, remote communities, changing light, flora or fauna, that give rise to her abstract interpretations. Her ceramics are frequently reflections of the famous Kimberley and Pilbara regions, many echoing the ‘vastness’ of place while others explore the ‘smallness’ of things. Memories are key and they run deep. She neither sketches nor photographs her travels, relying rather on emotions, on almost sub-conscious recollections that surface spontaneously to channel her vision.

Lesley Harding and Glenn Barkley write: “Pippin’s ensembles are tabletop–landscapes in their aesthetic manifestation, assemblages needing to be navigated. To borrow the language of New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, such installations require you to walk around them – interpret them physically – as much as to look at them. Within each configuration her forms lightly touch the ground and the whole array of objects undulates into peaks and valleys over which the eye can clamber. The richly coloured surfaces are inscribed with Pip’s own form of topographical mapping, recalling the spidery traces of grass and wind as they sing and sweep across the sand.” 3

“Australia” says Pippin, “is considered ‘young’ in many ways but the truth is that its culture is amongst the oldest in the world. I endeavour to reflect this through my three-dimensional porcelain creations, each one inspired by our bare and bleak continent and the first nations that have called it home for so long.”

“Coloured glazes, incised lines, applied to my porcelain (Devils) marbles and vessels, are my tools to capture the magnificent beauty of remote Australia’s unique environment, the changing hues of the six seasons and to highlight the threats they face.”

Drysdale is a WA State Living Treasure, a Master of Australian Craft and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts by Curtin University in 2020.

With Much In Common, Nothing Alike, Perth audiences have a rare opportunity to experience the ceramic brilliance of three extraordinary and influential artists. Over decades, Mincham has created his signature glazes, resulting in the unique palette he applies to his hand-coiled organic forms. Monumental in essence, regardless of scale, each artwork tracks changes in the hills of his Cherryville surrounds and the Fleurieu Peninsula, with history and contemporary events reflected equally. Drysdale clusters her porcelain marbles and vessels to evoke breathtaking abstract portraits of the outback through her passion for form and colour. Palmateer is undoubtedly a genius on the wheel, throwing monumental vessels that echo the drama of the ocean and beach, or the perfect porcelain backdrop for Drysdale’s clarion works. Much In Common, Nothing Alike is an inspiring look at the entirely individual practices of Mincham, Drysdale and Palmateer, highlighting their profound respect for the landscape’s physical and spiritual beauty.

Essay by Margaret Jeffery BA (Wits)

Linton & Kay Galleries, Curator: Much In Common

References

1Art Gallery of South Australia Magazine, issue 50 Autumn 2023, p.18 ISSN 2651-9909.

2Australian Design Centre, Jeff Mincham: On Inspiration on Vimeo.

3Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding revised from exh. cat. An Idea Needing to Be Made: Contemporary Ceramics, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2019.