YARROBIL
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CONTENTS
Editors Neil Mansfield Bernadette Mansfield
4 Slip and Away, what can I say?
Business Manager Josh Mansfield
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Throwing Shadows John Hughes
Administration Assistants Charlie Mansfield Max Mansfield
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Jack Doherty in Fuping Jack Doherty and Neil Mansfield
Peter Lange
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26 Ceramix - an exhibition in Maastrichi Paris; what is a meaningful event? Arnauld De L'Epine
34 Ceramic Stories from the Author's Collection Sebastian Blackie
51 Interstellar Travel, Ai Wei Wei
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and Strawberries. Under the Cantilever with Greg Daly Henrietta Farrelly-Barnett
56 In Support of Function Susie McMeekin
Administration Manager Siobhan Mansfield Creative Director Melissa Kallas Published quarterly by Mansfield Ceramics Pty. Ltd 269 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst Sydney NSW 2010 Australia PO Box 995 Potts Point NSW 1335 Phone +61 2 9332 4379 Design by Cirasa Design hello@cirasadesign.com.au Morning View Press 100 Woodburn Road Gulgong NSW 2852 Australia www.facebook.com/yarrobil
59 Living Landscape
Editorial content is welcome. Guidelines for submitting articles and photographs is available at www.yarrobil.com
Charlotte Nordin 70 Eva Kwong William Busta
Submit articles or correspondence online or email the editor at editor@yarrobil.com
76 The Pelagic Worlds of Eva Kwong
Peer review available for academic writers.
Douglas Max Utter
82 Woodfiring at Waubonsee
Subscriptions
Bernadette Mansfield 86 What inspires me? Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Jenny Orchard
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89 Touch
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Administration and Production Assistant Nicola Coady
Tom Supensky
101 Themeless Variation Owen Rye
Please complete the form included in this magazine, subscribe at our website or email us at: subscriptions@yarrobil.com
For information on advertising or retailing, please contact the editorial office at: editor@yarrobil.com Opinions expressed are those of the authors of articles. Although all editorial material is checked for accuracy, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for information printed in this magazine that may be ambiguous or incorrect.
103 Encounter
All material published is subject to copyright; please seek permission to reprint any part of the magazine.
104 Nourish
Cover image by Greg Piper. Work by Jenny Orchard.
Jack Troy
Bill Rodgers
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
ISSN 2204-9223
EDITORIAL
N: I’ve got to be honest with you, things are in a bit of a mess. It’s been a hectic end of year. B: Let’s go through things systematically following the IAC meeting in Barcelona and the opening of the Jane Sawyer show.
N: First stop Waubonsee College Chicago for the Woodfire Conference. B: A terrific event.
N: I didn’t know what to expect. Chicago and all ...
B: That why you booked our accommodation way out of town?
N: Well, it was mid elections, nerves were frayed. Even the cab drivers were quick to change the subject ...
B: Underwhelming accommodation aside, Mark Hewitt opened with his brilliant take on a lifetime of wood-firing and hoed into the bad and the ugly, along with the good. Chris Gustin’s strong and impassioned closing speech was pitched perfectly and reignited that urge to get back into the studio.
N: The writers panel got a bit heated ...
B: Just as well Waubonsee College is dry – everyone wanted to grab the mike. N: I wonder if you’ll be invited back ...
B: Jack Troy settled things down – now, there is a writer. N: The great thing I find about ceramics conferences are the exhibitions, opening one after the other, either work of the contributors or alumni of the host college or local artists. It keeps things real. B: It was lovely of Dan Anderson to drive us Down Town , but I think we lost him in the galleries. N: I don’t think he made it – we left him still looking for a parking spot.
B: John Neely, Lindsay Oesterritter and I kept an eye out for him while at the
same time being totally fascinated by the work of Dr Charles Smith, founder and curator of the African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive. I immediately emailed Jim Cooper some photos. N: What about Robert Sanderson’s Train Kiln he’d build at Waubonsee years ago? Clearly Doug Jeppesen has been establishing an excellent centre for wood-firing at the Sugar Grove Campus for some time now. B: What was it you said about Robert’s memory of it? N: That he was surprised it wasn’t as large as he remembered it. B: Must have been a good experience then, ‘cos that’s what the brain does, stores things through an emotional filter. N: Reality is rarely as compelling as our memories. B: I’m unsure what that means in regards me hardly remembering anything of the opening of the National Art School Graduate Prize Exhibition that we opened in the short time we were back in Australia – but it was good to get the McMeekin show up … N: Before you headed off to Santa Fe and the beautiful snow covered adobe buildings for the CFile AGM and Board Meeting. B: Garth and Mark have created the definitive site for ceramics. The excitement is palpable. And you winged it to China for the JM Award? N: To Fuping, yes, with its ever-evolving galleries of ceramic art from around the world. B: And now we’re back and there is this issue to get out, one more exhibition, an end-of-year firing and a bit of a break. N: A break? B: Yes. A break. N: Did I mention that I want to try a new way to sieve the clay out
at MV? And, I’ve got this idea about firing Alexandra Englefriets’s work. And what about the idea to include more Gonzo writing in the magazine? And we still must flesh out the theory of Iceberg writing. B: Add it all to the list and I promise to read it on January 20th. Until then, here’s to a happy, joyful holiday season and New Year. Whether you are unpacking your luggage from a conference, your work from a kiln, or the magnificent writings of CFile and its Campus, we wish you (and us) a restful and peaceful break.
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
PETER LANGE
Slippin’ Away, What Can I Say? CONTINUING MEMOIRS OF OF A RETIRING POTTER ON ANIMALS, DEATH AND SLIDESHOWS For a lot of my working life I’ve had pets around my workshop.
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hile dogs are generally uplifting and companionable, in the pottery, and attend to your latest creations with undiscerning enthusiasm and a nudge with the nose, cats are more likely to be as disdainful of your work as the art critic in the Daily Bugle, who also sniffs and sighs and looks out the window. But they, both cat and dog, can lend a settled domestic ambience that I seem to need and enjoy when I’m working. I had a cat, Puku ('stomach' in Maori), who loved sitting across my shoulders and neck like my grandmother’s fox-fur, while I threw – and also when I took her for a daily cross-country 'walk'. She didn’t like wet feet. She was not around on one particular morning when I started throwing, but unbeknown to me had stealthily positioned herself on the wedging bench two metres away, and after several wiggles of her bum (I imagine), sprung across the gap, claws out, to land across the back of my neck just as I reached the height of the tallest pot I had ever thrown. I think that’s when this new-fangled technique, 'thrown and altered', was invented. And I rediscovered a part of my voice I didn’t realise I’d retained since puberty. My first mentor and potter mate, Lex Dawson, who lived just up the same country road, had a dog called Nails who was his companion and adviser. Named after Nails MacFugger from The Onion Eaters he was a large black and white dog, with a mix of
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
enthusiasm and clumsiness who had to be calmed down (‘who’s the good boy then?”) as he crossed the threshold of the workshop because the diameter of the circular sweep of his tail was slightly wider than the distance between the rows of pots. Lex threw, Nails altered. I’ve still got one of their combined efforts to drink my tea from. Now and then Nails would sit quietly with the air of a well-fed philosopher, looking into space. You could almost hear him thinking, “I wonder if I’ll ever find out who the good boy is?” One day I was firing my diesel kiln and we had a power cut. They happened from time to time out in the sticks, and because the kiln was powered by a combination of gravity-fed diesel and air from an electric vacuum cleaner, there was a terrible pall of black smoke from the chimney as the burners suddenly lost air and got too fuel-rich. I closed it down, it was no real problem – it had only been going an hour or so on a very low setting, and usually the power cuts were not more than half-an-hour. I sat on the front step reading the paper, and after ten minutes or so a rather well-fed black cat came wandering across the yard. Although we lived half a mile from the nearest house, we knew all the pets in the area, and I didn’t recognise this one. It didn’t seem like a homeless cat although it did occur to me that it might have been dumped out in the country. I called it, it was tame and came over, sat down and started licking itself.
PETER LANGE
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5 Rat Bowl
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
PETER LANGE
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6 Lex Dawson
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
PETER LANGE
I picked it up, intrigued by its familiarity, and it slowly dawned on me, as its tongue got blacker and blacker and my shirt turned black too, that it was our own tabby cat, Rosie, her tabbiness well disguised with a coating of soot. It all made sense after a few seconds: she must have been sleeping in the kiln before I lit up – it was still warm from a previous firing – and had been trapped in there with flames blocking her only way out through the fire-ports.
it was up to 900ºC and unsurvivable. There was good colour in the kiln and he was able to see in. Everything seemed to be in place except that the cones were no longer there. They had been in a secure spot, but not any more. Very strange. They must have been knocked off the shelf by whatever was in there. We had to keep reassuring ourselves that it would have been impossible for one of the homeless guys who live at the end of the road to climb
None of this made much sense. In spite of all this, it was a really good firing.
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Then miraculously, thanks to the erratic service from our local power supplier, the flames had stopped and she had made her way through one of the ports and hot-footed it out to safety. Her feet were fine, but the soot was difficult to get off. Warm water and mild detergent does the trick if it happens to one of yours. I should have learnt from that, but a few years later the lesson was repeated. I was working at the Auckland Potters’ Centre in the office and a potter friend, Stuart Newby, had been firing the little diesel-salt kiln for a couple of hours when it started putting out a strange smell. A bit like burning hair or an oven roast on too high. There are a lot of stray cats in the area where we fire, and while the kiln was bricked up the night before, the fire ports had been open and the burners simply turned on the next morning. The smell got worse and a decision had to be made. To turn the kiln off and find an animal either dead or near-death was too unpleasant an option so Stuart decided to keep going, turn the kiln up full, and hope that it was already over for whatever was in there. The dreadful smell persisted for another hour or more and spread through the neighbourhood, but by then
in to sleep. So the kiln was fired by colour and guesswork and salted for an hour, and the test rings looked okay. The next day Stuart, and a small group of curious potters, unbricked the wicket carefully, not knowing what to expect: an avalanche of pots? fired remains? But almost everything was in order inside except for one or two odd signs. One of the bowls had little round beads of wadding inside it, another had an unexpectedly high gloss finish inside it and the cones were out of their cone pats (which had disappeared) but for some reason were lying over a metre away at the base of the chimney. None of this made much sense. In spite of all this, it was a really good firing. So we all sat around the table at the ASP Centre and over a cup of tea Detective Duncan Shearer of the Serious Ceramic Crime Squad slowly figured out what had happened. Cats were ruled out because of the lack of violent disruption in the kiln even though the smell seemed to indicate a large animal. The next obvious explanation was rats – probably more than one. We operate next to the city dump and they show up sometimes. But why were the cones moved and
YARROBIL MAGAZINE Mansfield Ceramics | Issue 6, 2017
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