The Journal of Australian Ceramics
Vol 56 No 2 July 2017 $16
www.australianceramics.com
9 771449 275007
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Vol 56 No 2 July 2017
ISSN 1449-275X
Focus: The Flame Issue Hot Earth Cool Clay Sidney Myer Award National Education Pictorial Survey
Editorial Australians know the destructive potential of fire, and yet we’re intimate with the vital role it plays in creation. Soon after wild fire has spread through country blackened pods burst open and surrender their seeds, and charred forest floors come alive with supple green shoots. According to the late Dr Tommy George, Kuku Thaypan elder from Cape York Peninsula, our land understands fire and belongs to it. For 60,000 years Australian Aboriginals used fire to manage country, and despite the more recent adoption of their ancient practices, we now witness the effect of Indigenous dispossession from country with catastrophic wild fire. And as global temperatures continue their upward trend, we must acknowledge that our planet has a flame issue.
Claire Atkins; photo: Lisa Cohen
However, we should draw some comfort from ceramic remains. Throughout history they tell the story of how we rise to challenge. Archaeologists suggest that the earliest known pottery shards formed in the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago were made in response to external forces such as climate change, food scarcity, internal division and social tensions. These pots predate sedentary agrarianbased society by two thousand years. In other words, the earliest known shards were made while our ancestors were still wandering the planet, and suggest that the first ceramics were made because conditions forced humans to change their old ways of doing things. Twenty thousand years later conditions are ripe for our response and ceramics are hotter than ever. But as the Earth’s temperature goes up, just how cool is clay? In this Flame Issue, Mike Hall puts the blowtorch on our industry’s environmental impact in a warming world. We’ll glaze with Rob Linigen using the remains of his home and studio that were devastated by bush fire, and be inspired by the battle-worn, soda-fired vessels of Jack Doherty, winner of the Janet Mansfield Memorial Award. We’ll read a cooling flame with Ray Cavill, build kilns like temples with Gyan Wall, fire in the earth with Dawn Whitehand, and fire in our sleep with Ursula Burgoyne and Jen Lyall. It’s a bumper issue that includes our hottest graduates in the National Education Pictorial Survey, and the winner and finalists of Australia’s richest ceramics prize, the 2017 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award – sure to ignite discussion. So how will we be judged? What stories will our shards tell future generations about the age of the Anthropocene?
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Focus: The Flame Issue
THE POETICS OF FIRE The soda-fired vessels of Jack Doherty by Sarah Frangleton
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Breathed by dragons, run through the streets by Olympic athletes, or simply to be gazed into on a midwinter’s night, fire is indeed the most primal of forces. One of the four elements in ancient western culture it is believed to be fundamental to life; it is also the most unpredictable, volatile and capricious. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says in his writings, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, “fire is the element in the centre of all things”. Universally it is at the heart and hearth of many creation myths from the beginnings of time; cultural, traditional or religious, mankind has envisaged the world formed from flames. Creation from a state of chaos. The symbolic reading of fire evokes a powerful image. It can represent pure spirit, vitality and passion, but also brutality and destruction. In character it is both passive and active with the ability to bring change. Greek mythology differentiates between the destructive fire associated with Hades, the god of the underworld, and the creative, benevolent fire connected to Hephaistos, the god of blacksmiths, sculptors and craftsmen. From industrial manufacture to contemporary arts practice, the forge, the foundry and the kiln harness the raw energy of this natural resource for practical and creative application. Irish potter Jack Doherty makes porcelain soda-fired vessels. His work is concerned in a way with function; containing, holding and storing, but not necessarily utility. He describes them as revealing qualities of art and utensil. He states, I am intrigued and inspired by the potency of archetypal vessel forms. Anonymous and uncomplicated pots from pre-history used for storing, cooking and keeping people safe through winters and giving protection in the everyday world can also function in other ways. I see them as figurative objects. As guardians of emotion and connectors with the spiritual, I want my work to inhabit our domestic spaces in the light, shadow and darkness with qualities that neither painting or abstract sculpture can. Over the years his working process has become simpler and more refined in the belief that stripping away what is unnecessary can produce work with complexity and depth. His work is made using one clay, one colouring mineral, and a single firing.
Opposite: Jack Doherty Guardian Vessel on the Mantelpiece, 2016 porcelain, soda-fired h.40cm Jack Doherty Teabowl on the Blue Cupboard, 2014 porcelain, soda-fired, h.6cm Photos: Rebecca Peters
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Focus: The Flame Issue
FLAME’S FOOTPRINT CLAY, CARBON AND CLIMATE
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Mike Hall explores the impact of ceramic production on global warming and how companies, studio potters and artists are working to mitigate their carbon footprint. Protests against the expansion of coal seam gas (CSG) in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales came to a head in 2014 when thousands took part in the Bentley Blockade near Lismore, an iconic action that led the government to suspend CSG licences across parts of NSW. Ceramic artist Liz Stops joined the protesters. A Bentley resident, her attachment to nature was reflected in her work – “environmentally derived and landscape-oriented” porcelain forms. She was horrified by the prospect of living in a gasfield. “The Bentley Blockade intensified my concern for the environment,” she says, and helped drive her commitment to activism, and transform her art practice. “I’m trying to understand how we’ve come to face the threat of catastrophic climate change, and one way I do that is by making work.” As part of her PhD work Carbon Credits, Stops established sustainable studio procedures, with some of her strategies “contributing to a cycle of nourishment and care” for the landscape. Ceramic production is energy-intensive. Fuel to heat kilns causes emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, a greenhouse gas that leads to global warming and climate change) so does the decarbonisation of clay and materials during firing, the mining, processing and transportation of raw materials and finished goods, and the use of other materials such as packaging. Australia’s ceramics industry produced about 1 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions in 2015–16, according to the Department of the Environment and Energy. That’s less than 0.2 per cent of the total 536.5 million tonnes for the whole country. Large companies account for the bulk of these emissions. The contribution of small-scale potters and artists is insignificant. Even so, the prospect of dangerous global warming has spurred many ceramicists – from lone artists to large companies – to embark on efforts to reduce their own carbon footprint, as well as highlight the issue through art and activism. Stops says she has “greatly curtailed” porcelain production. Since her slip ingredients are now imported, which adds to her work’s environmental footprint, she makes porcelain objects for just one outlet in Sydney. A grid-feed solar system at her home studio meets her net electricity requirements for
Opposite: Liz Stops, Landscape/Erosion, 2006 slipcast porcelain and recycled porcelain with inclusions h.50cm, w.55cm, d.32cm; photo: Cher Breeze
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Focus: The Flame Issue
THE ART OF ANAGAMA KILN BUILDING by Gyan Daniel Wall Gyan Daniel Wall and Hillary Kane pack the ‘GayaGama’, designed and built by Gyan Wall for the Gaya Ceramic Arts Center in Bali.
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THE COOLING FLAME by Ray Cavill When I go on holiday I look forward to that point of no return when the plane is about to take off and there is nothing more you can do. What’s in is in, what’s forgotten is forgotten, the prep is done, and now it’s time for the journey and to make do with what you have. I love that point, and I get it when I’m firing too – when the softest of flame is just visible through the spy holes. The kiln is dark, and the ware is illuminated only by the ambient-light, and the soft, deep-red flame drifts slowly dusting the work with super-fine fly ash. And we’re off. What happens next is days of labour, laughs, drama, anticipation, gossip, food and, occasionally, sleep. There are many aspects of this process, and all are subject to the personal and external variations inherent in this arts practice. But this ramble is about the end game, the last hours or days of the firing.
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FIVE WAYS WITH CLAY The 2017 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award in review by Sophia Cai
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The Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (SMFACA) at the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is one of the most significant ceramics exhibitions in Australia. Not only does it come with a significant cash prize, the award also provides a current snapshot of contemporary ceramics practice. This year’s offering is an unashamed celebration of clay through the works of Glenn Barkley, Karen Black, Laith McGregor, Yasmin Smith and well-deserving winner Jenny Orchard. All five artists harness ceramics to ambitious effect, and the resulting group exhibition is a visually exceptional show that opens up conversations beyond medium-specificity to consider broader material and conceptual underpinnings. Since 2015 the SMFACA has focused exclusively on Australian contemporary artists. Its staging at SAM is significant as the museum holds one of the largest collections of ceramics in Australia, which has been strengthened through the ceramic award and the acquisition of past recipients. This year, the finalists were shortlisted from more than 100 entries with curator Anna Briers describing the selection process as based not on technical proficiency or how established the artist was, but rather how they used the medium within a contemporary art context. This focus on concept rather than practice, while notable, has not been without controversy within the broader ceramics community. Jenny Orchard, The Imagined Possibility of Unity, 2017 ceramic, metal stand, rubber, plastic polymer pipe, raffia, synthetic fibre, bubble wrap, plastic chandelier parts tin necklace, car tyre inner tube; various dimensions Photo: Christian Capurro, courtesy the artist and Despard Gallery, Hobart
My initial impression of the exhibition is its ambitious scale, with a particular focus on spatial practice and installation-based work. All five artists have been allocated a single room in the upstairs gallery and the presentation feels like five solo exhibitions rather than a group show. The format allows audiences to appreciate each artist’s practice as a whole by giving them the space and resources to create significant new bodies of work. In instances where the artists also work with non-ceramic mediums, their potential relationship to ceramics is evoked through this immersive mode of display.
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NATIONAL NATIONAL EDUCATION EDUCATION PICTORIAL PICTORIAL SURVEY SURVEY 2017 2017
NATIONAL ART SCHOOL SYDNEY NSW www.nas.edu.au
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1 Jayanto Damanik Tan 2 Jane McKenzie 3 Mechelle Bounpraseuth 4 Maricelle Oliver 5 Emily Walder 6 Rachel Dreyfus 7 Georgia Bosnic 8 Remy Pajaczkowski-Russell
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