The Journal of Australian Ceramics
Vol 56 No 1 April 2017 $16
www.australianceramics.com
9 771449 275007
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Vol 56 No 1 April 2017
ISSN 1449-275X
Tribute: Peter Travis AM Sarah Ormonde & John Wolseley FOCUS: THE BODY ISSUE Clay Bodies, Yoga and the Plastic Brain
Contents 3 EDITORIAL 5 AWARDS & GALLERY 8 SHARDS 10
TRIBUTE Vale Peter Travis AM 1927–2016 by Grace Cochrane AM
FOCUS: THE BODY ISSUE
16 Embodying The Landscape by Sebastian Blackie 20 Myths, Murders & Other Misadventures The Works of Stephen Bird by Inga Walton 26
Fragile Flesh The Works of Andrew Nicholls, Nathan Beard and Susan Flavell by Travis Kelleher
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Sonores by Ana Maria Asan
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A Circle: Being Fragmented and Being Whole by Alma Studholme
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Get Centred by Peter Howe
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Done & Dusted: Vipoo Srivilasa’s Dust Free Zone
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Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud John Edye introduces four essays on clay bodies
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Adventures in Clay by Chris ‘Indiana’ James
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In The Red by Jane Sawyer
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Single-Stone Porcelain by Dr Steve Harrison
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New Frontiers: To The Edge of Melt by Amy Kennedy
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Serious Play: Clay and the Plastic Brain by Brian Snapp
The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 56 No 1 APRIL 2017 $16 Cover: Amy Kennedy, Untitled, detail 2017, handbuilt, clay/glaze material with glass additions, 1280°C h.12cm, w.32cm, d.19cm Photo: Christopher Sanders
Publication dates 1 April, 17 July, 20 November Publisher The Australian Ceramics Association PO Box 677 Alexandria NSW 1435 T: 1300 720 124 F: +61 (0)2 8072 1804 mail@australianceramics.com www.australianceramics.com
Managing Editor Vicki Grima www.vickigrima.com.au Editor of Content Claire Atkins www.pinkyandmaurice.com Marketing and Promotions Carol Fraczek
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Contents REGULARS 65
VIEW 1: Gondwana Horizon Jan Howlin reviews Barbara Campbell-Allen’s solo exhibition in Bangalore, India
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VIEW 2: Dry Sand, Wet Mud, Moving Earth Sarah Ormonde talks about her latest exhibition with John Wolseley
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STUDIO: Step Inside the Creative Space of Charlie & Blair
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ASSOCIATION: The Trudie Alfred Bequest Follow Up 2016
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PROMOTION Walker Ceramics
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TECHNICAL: The Bears Pamela Pudan investigates Walter Auer’s terra sigillata obsession
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WEDGE: Bodies and Highways of Thinking by Jacques Kaufmann
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POTTERS MARKS
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CERAMIC SHOTS: My Ceramic Wears
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EVENT: Smoke on the Water – A Potters’ Party Australian Woodfire Conference 28 June – 1 July 2017
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AUSTRALIA WIDE
The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 56 No 1 APRIL 2017 $16 Design Astrid Wehling www.astridwehling.com.au Subscriptions Manager Montessa Maack Proofreader, content Suzanne Dean
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Australia Wide Reports ACT: Sue Hewat NSW: Jan Downes NT: Sarah Body QLD: Frances Smith SA: Sunshine March TAS: Serena Rosevear VIC: Robyn Phelan WA: Andrea Vinkovic
THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS APRIL 2017
ABN 14 001 535 502 ISSN 1449-275X Printed by Newstyle Printing Co Pty Ltd 41 Manchester St, Mile End SA 5031 Certified to AS/NZS ISO 14001:2004 Environmental Management Systems. Printed on Sovereign Silk using 100% vegetable-based Newstyle Printing Logo options for FSC Mixed. process inks.
Editorial
Humans have made art for thousands of years. As a teenager at art school I wrote essays about why we did, explaining earnestly how the earliest paintings, songs and dances helped our ancestors celebrate and make sense of the world. And that’s still true; we are cultural beasts, but we’re flesh and blood too. MONA director David Walsh recently spoke about his latest exhibition On the Origin of Art, and paraphrasing evolutionary psychologist and curator Geoffrey Miller, Walsh says “we make art to get laid and to satisfy”. How that wasn’t obvious to me Photo: Megan Kinninment as a hormonal art student is anyone’s guess, but following Darwin’s sexual selection theory, art-making is intimately linked to our bodies and desires. It’s timely, and with pleasure, that I present my maiden edition as editor, ‘The Body Issue’ – no sealed section and no dietary tips just 128 luscious pages of inspiring ideas and imagery to spark the synapses and stimulate the senses. We’ll climb through twenty tonnes of the slippery stuff with Alexandra Engelfriet in Sebastian Blackie’s evocative ‘Embodying The Landscape’; see Stephen Bird pull his skeletons from the closet with Inga Walton in ‘Myths, Murders and Other Misadventures’; search for wild-clay bodies with Chris ‘Indiana’ James; be fascinated by clay’s potential to reshape our brains through serious play with Professor Brian Snapp – and that’s just for starters! And … I want to acknowledge Vicki Grima. Her contribution as editor for the last eleven years (33 issues) is staggering; I’m so grateful for her expert guidance and support in my new role. So let us begin, aware of our fragility as we pay tribute to the life of the late Peter Travis, an extraordinary Australian. I have enormous gratitude for Peter because it was his encouragement twentyfive years ago that propelled me along this clay-slicked path. Were it not for our chance meeting I might never have made a pot, much less become an editor of a magazine about them.
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FOCUS: THE BODY ISSUE Alexandra Engelfriet, Gulgong, 2016; photo: Bronwyn Kemp
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Focus: The Body Issue
EMBODYING THE LANDSCAPE by Sebastian Blackie Alexandra Engelfriet, Tranchee, 2013, 20 tonnes earthenware clay, body-shaped, woodfired, h.2.3m, w.2.8m, d.10m Photo: Guillaume Ramon; Le Vent des Forets, France
As I walk at dawn, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s quote: “To live is to leave traces.” Above, the first flights of the day leave their transitory vapor trails in a clear cold sky. At the river’s edge where cows have trampled the bank, their hooves have sunk deep into the soft clay forming a pattern of miniature ponds and squelched up pinnacles dramatised by the low light of the morning sun. There is a powerful sense of materiality, a record of weight and force that also reveals something of the clay’s nature. In places the slippery forms are cracked, a remnant of a dry summer; elsewhere they have begun to disintegrate, a crumbled sign of early frosts. This trace in the clay is interesting both in the similarity to the work of Alexandra Engelfriet and in the way that they are completely different. In European languages the word for land refers to something to which people belong. Scape, ship, shape, sceppan and schaft all mean ‘to form’. Landscape, or landschap in Dutch, carries in its etymology a relationship where the land forms the people just as much as the people form the land – two kinds of body in relationship. Engelfriet’s practice demonstrates that it is a concept that still has currency despite the tsunami of modernity; indeed she has found a new imperative for enacting this relationship and given it form. Her performance at Clay Gulgong 2016 was particularly poignant given the geological, social and cultural history of Australia’s wonderfully strange land. Engelfriet was fascinated by the colour of the Australian clay: golden in Hobart, with white kaolin and red earthenware at Gulgong which she mixed with her body, significant in a country where some of its indigenous people continue to use their skin as a canvas and the earth as their pallet.
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Focus: The Body Issue
MYTHS, MURDERS & OTHER MISADVENTURES The Works of Stephen Bird by Inga Walton Since emigrating to Australia from Scotland in 2007, Stephen Bird has garnered considerable renown for his audacious and topical ceramic works, with their strong narrative content and pithy socio-political references. Whether free-standing sculptures, vessels, or plates, Bird’s consistent focus on the figure and its various permutations imbues his works with an immediacy that both engages and provokes viewers. “I think clay connects people with a primordial past, before ‘the fall’ and man’s alienation from nature,” Bird muses. “I see humanity as being very primitive really (just look at recent events in America) with this veneer of sophistication. I don’t want my art to hide behind a veneer; I want it to be a bit scary and make people unsure of what they are really seeing.” As a result, Bird’s works often deal with the body in a visceral and frank manner, including depictions of nudity, violence, sex, and abuse. It’s a very old dilemma. An artist wants to paint or make a sculpture of a person. If the figure is clothed, then ninety per cent of the work is drapery. If they have no clothes, they are naked and that only works in certain environments: the bath, bed, and beach, maybe. So the artist clothes the figure in shadows, colour or markmaking, or facets, or primitive masks. If the figure is truly naked people blush and turn their gaze away. I think that’s why I like erotic art so much, as then you get the chance to see the naked truth about people. Nobody looks at an erotic painting and asks, ‘What is this one about then?’ Stephen Bird The touring exhibition Bastard Son of Royal Doulton affords audiences the opportunity to observe the deft interplay between ceramics and painting that characterise Bird’s output. For some years Bird has used the sedate and decorative form of traditional ornamental wares made by Staffordshire pottery manufacturers as the basis for satirical works. “What I like about souvenir ceramics is their lack of pretention and sophistication. Their function is to return us to a place where we have felt the rapture of life and want something to touch and recall that
Stephen Bird, Saturn Eating a Man’s Leg, detail, 2016, glazed earthenware h.67cm, w.35cm, d.28cm; photo: artist
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Focus: The Body Issue
Andrew Nicholls, Brent with Porcelain Skull (portrait of Brent Harrison) 2016, digital print, various dimensions; photo: artist
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Focus: The Body Issue
FRAGILE FLESH The Works of Andrew Nicholls Nathan Beard and Susan Flavell by Travis Kelleher
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Focus: The Body Issue
Despite the closure of major learning facilities across Australia during the past decade1, recent years have seen a resurgence of ceramics practice internationally, in particular by artists from non-craft backgrounds approaching the medium from a conceptual perspective2. Nathan Beard, Susan Flavell, and Andrew Nicholls are three such artists who particularly draw on the medium’s historical context in relation to race, gender, and class. Nicholls, whose practice is largely centred on ink drawing, owes his aesthetic sensibility to a Spode ‘Italian’ platter that hung on the wall of his childhood home, its enduringly popular blue and white pattern – in continual production since 18163 – working its way into his psyche from an early age. At university he first came to appreciate its cultural lineage, reflecting the economic rivalries of East and West during the 18th century as Europeans developed the techniques to produce their own fine ceramics, rather than having to import wares from Asia4. In 2004 he undertook a residency at the Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent, the first of many international pilgrimages he would curate for himself and others, seeking to unpick the darker historical motivations of aesthetic legacies we commonly consider benign. “Of all the great British china factories, Spode more than any other has always glorified its colonial roots,”5 Nicholls states. His Australian Sporting series, produced with the factory’s centuries-old copper plates, presents an Australian colonial drama set on stark white bone china, in dubious homage to Spode’s iconic ‘Indian Sporting’ designs depicting violent hunting expeditions from the British Raj, the enduring popularity of which he considers “staggering”. For Nicholls, Britain’s ceramics industry is inescapably linked to violence and death and driven by the racial tensions inherent to colonial expansion. Nothing embodies this better than the ubiquitous Willow Pattern, still frequently assumed to be Chinese, but actually Chinoiserie, invented by the English to undercut Asia’s domination of the ceramics market6. The pattern, and Nicholls’ fascination with George IV’s orientalist Royal Pavilion, inspired his current group curatorial project: Chinoiserie remains something of a guilty pleasure, via its aesthetic charm, but intensely problematic and kitsch appropriation of Asian culture. It reflects the worst excesses of imperialism, yet reflects a level of fascination for the ‘other’ that can be read as (albeit naively) cosmopolitan in spirit 7. The project, currently in progress, invited 14 artists (including Beard and Flavell) to interrogate this legacy, informed by residencies at the Royal Pavilion and in Jingdezhen, China8. Nicholls’ series of skulls and crossbones were produced for the project in Jingdezhen. “I liked the idea of taking a symbol as cringe-inducingly overused as a skull to symbolise the violence of British imperialism,” he explains. “As such, I hope the works speak more broadly about aesthetic decline and failure9.” A photograph of his friend, artist Brent Harrison, staring wistfully at one of the skulls is a contemporary Vanitas, where Harrison’s supple body contrasting with the bone-like appearance of the porcelain recalls medieval ‘Death and the Maiden’ motifs.
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