[ tribute to alan peascod ]

Alan Peascod was one of Australia’s best known and, over the years, most imitated ceramicists. He was born in England, and moved to Australia with his family at an early age. His father’s paintings motivated him to study painting, but he ended up with a ceramics qualification from East Sydney Tech in 1965. After a period at Sturt Pottery in Mittagong, he began teaching at the School of Art in Canberra in 1972, and in the same year, through a fortunate accident, he developed a life-changing interest in Islamic ceramics, after meeting Said el-Sadr, an Egyptian who was experimenting with reduced lustre ceramics.
In his words, “How serendipitous, how chancy our meeting was! It leaves me breathless to think that in the space of a few moments the direction of my creative life altered entirely. This meeting with him had possibly the greatest single impact on my entire career. If we had not met I am sure my work would have lacked the dimension it gained in my later career thanks to Said’s teaching and my exposure to quite lateral, quite different points of view.”

This contact eventually led Peascod to travels in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Spain and Europe to study Islamic ceramics, and to a complete departure from earlier Asian stoneware influences. He became the only potter in Australia taking a profound interest in Islamic ceramics, studying this work intensely as a source for understanding the nature of ceramics and as a springboard to imagination. He became a prolific exhibitor in many countries and most recently his international activities involved studying and working with majolica at Gubbio in Italy.

His ceramic work evolved from all his experiences and was recognised and valued widely, as witnessed by his membership of the International Academy of Ceramics. He worked, did residencies and gave lectures and workshops internationally. His work is held in public collections in China, Spain, Germany, New Zealand and Italy as well as in Australia and in addition to those countries he exhibited in England, Canada, Switzerland, Japan and the USA.

Left: Jar, 1984, stoneware, reduced lustre, h.35cm
Middle: Large Gold Form, 1994, stoneware, h.33cm
Right: Gold Form 1, 1994, stoneware, h.33cm

Peascod’s teaching had a profound influence on many of his students. He taught at the Canberra School of Art from 1972 to1984. In 1985 and 1986 he taught and headed the ceramics department at the Glasgow School of Art and from 1987–98 he was head of ceramics at Illawarra Institute of Technology. He was awarded a Doctorate in Creative Arts in 1995 for his research at Wollongong University.

Peascod, throughout his career, showed great technical diversity, and he developed new technologies to precisely match his aesthetic and expressive ambitions. During the 1970s, for example, he developed an entirely new type of surface treatment with his dry glazes, notably the barium blue which inspired copyists the length and breadth of Australia. In the 1980s and ‘90s his work on reduced lustres reached a high point and his friendship and collaboration with the English master Alan Caiger Smith was stimulating and fruitful. Recent work with Giampetro Rampini in Gubbio in Italy, fuelled his emerging interest in majolica.

Over the years his innovative and unusually extensive repertoire on vessels included various dry glazes, lustres (reduced and resinate including his signature all gold works), alkaline glazes, majolica, and saturated metallics, as well as a variety of post-firing finishes. Each type required a different approach both conceptually and technically, and he developed many specialised kilns to achieve overall technologies unique to him. Some, such as the dry glaze, were his inventions, and others, such as the reduced lustre techniques, are his revivals of traditional technologies at a standard few others can match. His Islamic-inspired vessels (the ewer predominating) were based on a study of the forms of traditional Islamic glass rather than ceramic, and these narrow footed vessels with his signature handles are his best known forms. He began early in his career experimenting with figurative works and these, in more recent years, became predominant. His search for suitable surface qualities for his figurative work resulted in a variety of powerful but subtle resolutions unseen elsewhere in ceramics. Like many other potters he took satisfaction in returning to earlier works and reinvigorating and reinterpreting them in the light of new knowledge, so nothing about his work ever remained static or ‘finished’.

Top left: Australian Baroque, 2002, terracotta, diam.32cm. Right: Jess’ Calf, 2004, terracotta, diam.32cm
Bottom left: Left: Large Form, 1987, press-moulded, stoneware, barium blue glaze, h.45cm Bottom Right: Dream of Flight, 2004, porcelain, h.40cm

In his later years his family moved to the Gulgong district and he adapted his whole repertoire to expressing his new surroundings, adopting both the landscape and the people into his work. Especially in his majolica painting and in the drawings on which he increasingly focused we can see the distinctive hills around Gulgong, and the people he observed closely. The people became immortalised in his porcelain figures in a fleeting facial gesture or a transient stance frozen forever. His last works, when he was no longer able to work with clay consisted of drawings often with an elaborately decorative quality and rich colour combinations.

Over his life he had lung problems due to asthma, and these gradually became insurmountable after a long period of illness. His death is a great personal loss to me. We met many years ago in Canberra through our mutual interest in the Islamic world, and were mates from that time onwards. I always valued his wise advice and many times he talked me out of doing something professionally ill-considered or unwise. To have a close insight into his way of working and to see the profoundly different ways he thought through and developed his work was one of my life’s great privileges. Our frequent emails ranged widely. We shared deep concern for the negative propaganda about the Islamic world, and despaired at political developments. Alan’s irreverent views about the work of others he considered unprofessional and his great respect for professionalism all emerged in our email exchanges. Alan is irreplaceable and Australia has lost one of its gifted artists, an individual the likes of whom we will not see again. As I said at his memorial, he brought beauty to a world where there is much ugliness.