Is there a particular school of thought that inspires your practise?
A lot of the influences on ceramics in the West came from the east from Japan principally. Japanese don't have these silos craft design art. The highest expression of beauty can be in useful things. Ceramics have the position that paintings have. The whole Western notion of art devalues what I do, and says art is for useless things. Make your work more artful by making it more useless. People say practicality exist over here and aesthetics over there. One of my friends calls pots ‘sculptures with benefits’. I am aiming for an engaged usefulness. Unlike a painting, a vessel you can move around to different places and see it in different lights. Plates, vases are particularily interactive. My creativity is finished at this point. The person who buys it, their journey has just started. That's what craft has always been about, for me. Making useful things that spoke of the materials of a place and the culture of a place and could be used for both daily use and special ceremonial use.
How do you bring the materials of a place into your work?
I live on bushland on the South Arm Peninsula and use elements of the landscape around me. Under the bark of the wattle trees grubs make patterns as they meander feed. I made a roller from this pattern and apply it to the surfaces. It's a texture that you can repeat and overlay. I am not trying to make it look like a grub, it's about producing a texture that is suggestive of that.
When you look out from the studio window you can see the oyster farms forming a pattern on the water. I use this texture on the surfaces. I made a series about dolerite mountains. The dolerite rock cleaves in sharp angles on the mountains but is actually weathered and rounded on the shore here. It is about how those materials exist in in nature in transition through weather. We live in a great environment, and I am trying to allow that in as much as possible rather than looking too much outside.
By the ‘outside’ you mean outside lutruwita?
Yes. When I started in that was in the late 70s, we were isolated in a lot of ways. Didn't have access to the plethora of information that's out there. materials were hard to get. There was a sense in a lot of people who were making them in art and craft areas of wanting to respond to the stories to the landscape of this place. With the internet came the pressure to thing large and engage with the wider world. Telling local stories seemed immature.
Have you explored much of the island in a creative context?
As part of my Masters at uni I went on field trips to contested areas in the state, around the West Coast and Maria Island. I collected materials for firing. My process became a lot about how I viewed these places. I ended up doing what I call journal poetics. I ended up doing poetic writing it as a way of responding to what I was seeing. And I came across a description of someone else's work, an English sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy. He talked about his more ephemeral work such as his sculptures made of ice as ‘a breathing in’ and the permanent works as a ‘breathing out’. That resonated with me. I felt my poetic writing represented the breathing in of what I was seeing, and the pots the breathing out.
Would you share a poem perhaps?
…on the way
What is the process for wood firing?
When you stack the kiln you have to think about where the flames are going to go. It is important to keep the arrangement of pots balanced so you get a consistent even temperature throughout. I took me eight days to stack the kiln for our last firing. A firing takes about 55 hours. It is a very physical task keeping the fire in the kiln burning at 1300 degrees. We have a group of people’s ceramics in there a lot of the time so we all take shifts working through the day and night keeping the kiln stacked with wood. We share food and sit around chatting for most of it.
It must be very exciting opening up the door to see the results?
It takes four or five days for the kiln to cool down. It takes about a day to unload it. With most practices the last time you touch something that's how it remains. With wood firing it goes through a transformative process and it may or may not come out anything like what you expect. When it all comes out at once, it's very hard to take in the potential of pieces that have come out differently to what you expected. So you just have to give it some time. If you judge them straight away, you judge them on expectation and not their potential.
In what way do wood fired ceramics look different from ones fired in a gas kiln?
I put the ceramics into the kiln unglazed, so the glaze on the pots is melted ash. When the melted ash doesn’t stick it creates a different texture. Our kiln in constructed similar to some of earliest kilns that were made out of bricks in China. As the Chinese constructed better kilns they noticed they can get to higher temperatures where the ash melts. They started adding clay to the ash and this is how the history of glazes began.
Are you interested in making objects to the standards of an other time?
Its more about doing things that trying to respond to what the materials suggest.
Looking at Japan with a strong ceramic tradition, isolated communities that built strong regional aesthetic responses based on the materials they had access to locally.
I think there's a real lesson there. We live in an age where there's a massive industrial supply system. I decided to go back to looking at ways to work with what is here. Even for my more commercial work I made glazes that are from Tasmanian materials. What I do is on a line between nature and the human constructed environment. Often when we're in nature, we're at our most contemplative, and in the city where most frantic. I thought about that in terms of the materials.