Of the many special things that experience allows us with clay-baked things, such as the finest ceramics from Lex Dickson, one is always for me the movement from eye to hand provoked by the aesthetic acknowledgement of something important at the focus of the gaze. Let me expand the point. It is the motion from that initial eye-gazing (if not eye-glazing in the best sense) instant, when the aesthetic, formal and functional intermix of the ‘object’ in front of us provides that singular gasp - truly aesthetic but something elsewise inexpressible - which connects to the following gesture; the hand reaches to touch. A kind of desire - and not I think so basic, and base, as to merely own, or possess. No, most likely to hold, and thereby curiously to be compact within the object’s implications, rather than contain it. If anything simply the desire to follow the artist’s hand to help understand the creative process. Lex Dickson’s work does not merely demand that sequence of awe and gesture, but adds dimensions of creativity itself as the focus of his artworks.

The length ‘moment’ intervening between gaze and gesture may be a measure if such is needed of the brilliance of the artist. In most public galleries the other component - that gesture of the hand - is denied by the contingencies of gallery space - so it must be imagined or vaguely ‘waved’ at - a kind of pointing to, or the hands mimicking the shapes, their intersections and surfaces - an acquisition by proxy - and then a looking - harder and longer to make concrete, at least in the mind’s eye, the ‘feel’ of the piece. The functional or utilitarian simply - asserts; it’s a fine plate, certainly a welcoming convexity as bowl or vase or cup; a nicely judged glaze or sensible and discretely ornamental pattern on this jug. They will hold water, or wine, and delight enough. Lex Dickson has never turned from the ‘use’ issue. Indeed he would happily assert and does, that much of what he produces is meant to be used. But art, and his work is also art - art does more. It may do the simple things, not simplistic a ‘must’ assertion too, but Dickson’s art also does much more.

Ceramics is not usually concerned with meaning beyond that formal beauty which may enhance function, but Dickson’s work is instinct with additional meaning; he is concerned with history and time - tightly focused on the practice of his own art through its evolution and influences, but also through the use and production of ceramics as cultural processes now and within history. To these his recent work is also analytic of his environment. In its stratification, layerings, their ruptures and surface effects, his works evoke topographic metaphors, allusions to the environment of his immediate neighbourhood - the region around Clareville and Pittwater in the Northern Beaches of Sydney.

From his earliest practice Lex Dickson has produced pieces that are paramount examples of the eye/hand nexus, as extension of his media including, but also beyond the liminality of their function. Beautiful forms, luxurious even ravishing surfaces, combine to provoke that awed doubled compound reply. Intelligence, wit, dare one say ‘exquisite taste’ (yes one does say it), are characteristic. And his pieces are more often functional. They can be held, must be held. But in that there is always a cultural cachet. To explain. At Solander in 2003 the Tactile Surfaces show featured a number of wall plaques and dinnerware sets. In each set, six small Japanese style bowls were presented in purpose- built wooden trays or compartmentalised boxes - a nod to the Japanese picnic-box. No bowl’s surface glaze (ranging from tenmoku, celadon, cream, and others) was repeated, whether within the six, or despite similarities, across the numerous sets of six - a controlled contrariety. Functional yes, beautiful, absolutely. And even more, as cultural event each set pointed forwards in itself to its functionality as dinnerset - obvious of course and more the textured surfaces of each unique piece would, it seems to me, re-inforce the experience of the meal eaten from and upon the set. The colour, texture, taste, and smell of this piece of food set on and against the glaze, its smell, its feel as the food is moved over it, and so on. Japanese in cultural influence? yes: exemplary case: the tea-ceremony as cultural event. So it is for Dickson, Japanese cultural influence, personal Dickson twist, as transformation into Australian version of glaze, timber and so on. If not quite the tempura abalone then the barbecued prawn. Everything speaks care and attention to this level of detail, and intent.

Teabowl, Anagama fired, Ash & Shino glazes h.72mm w. 138mm

Teabowl, Anagama fired, Ash & Shino glazes h.72mm w. 137mm

The wall plaques formed another part of the Solander show, sharing the technical bravura, while adding a formal innovation - ceramics meant to hang on walls and be looked at as art. Large platters (or wall plaques) with mixed surfaces show deliberative potting control, jostled against artistic risk. Any piece might display a division of its ‘surface’ into distinct regions. So, curvy-sided oblong or square ‘plates’ have zones of white bricks or stepping stones - a tessellation of white crumbling, even marshmallowy powdered-looking surfaces, overlaying a seeping-upwards black underglaze. In another zone or region, a deeply dark charcoally black glaze invites close inspection - yes, it reflects but it also refractively submerges the eye as you get close. Several of these zoned plates are ‘crossed’ or marked further with signs - for example, two thin strips of a green glaze hatched with what looks like black burns diagonally intersect. One could liken some of the marks to kinds of calligraphic marks - echoes or pre-memories of ancient or future handwritings - others to ‘fossil’ clays buried within other clays and glazes.

Throughout Dickson’s more recent works are similar marks, sometimes painted glazed marks, crosses, imperfectly curved suggestions of letters, whole alphabets, and sometimes incisions in the surfaces, which expose the layerings beneath. Sometimes the shape of a shellfish alludes to a Maori symbol, a New Zealander’s memory of ancestries outside his immediate life and still a cultural possession, whether it is of him or he it. Whether calligraphic or not they are distinct signs of the artist’s presence, and announce the insertion or even intrusion of personal histories from wider contexts outside and other than pottery. His marks - evidence of decisions made - the hand’s movements recorded.

Critic John Freeland (Pottery in Australia, March 2000, p. 29-31) in a highly thoughtful and important article observed an evolutionary trend in Dickson’s work over the last decade, the intrusion of risk-taking with the surfaces and their glazes. Reviewing the Robin Gibson Gallery show, Vessels in Evolution (the title itself throws out some useful metaphors for how Dickson saw his own work), Freeland suggests Dickson began to move from more deliberative control, while noting already the interests in stratification, edge, and an increase in techniques that allowed it, to even more spontaneous actions. Freeland still cites these techniques as decorative and includes, combing, brushing, cutting and incising. And he felt that the exhibition marked a change in potentia as Dickson’s art matured. My point is that for Dickson these decorative techniques have become metaphor as well as decoration, that each effect is now often more a record of the process of making - of the actual hand of the potter upon the clay, and its sequences of such hands. That the risk for effect has become an edginess as and for meaning. No longer potential or a trend it is now the mark of a most important and mature artist.

This kind of work requires several firings, often with different fuel stocks, sometimes wood, sometime leaf ash and so forth, and once ‘finished’ each piece speaks of the history of its own evolution. This is indeed Dickson’s intent. Rather than leave the work un-marked as if to say it was just made more or less ab ovo or more strongly a piece sui generis, Dickson is interested, insistent even, in the way that the work reflects itself and accepts its often chance or risky occurrences in the firing, as much as it does his ‘hand’ within and upon it. The creation is a struggle, a challenge, the lineage evident in the object’s topographic appearance, its sediments of making, and being made.

To this point I have looked at Dickson’s work as largely reflective of its own meaning as art, as a process mimetic of its own evolution as a creative work. Enough by itself to assure Dickson’s status as a major artist in the field, the focus on imagination and practice isn’t the only matter to be read within Dickson’s work. Certainly the local environment of Clareville and the beaches had an impact - in the formal and decorative suites of Dickson’s work. So many of his three-sided objects in shino and vitrified black slip from 2000 and before mimic the swollen sails of the yachts plying Pittwater. Many other pieces were painted with leaf and tree designs recalling the flora of the local area. And in general the topographic effects of the large platters as so many geological layers or strata feel very like the topography of so many of the northern beaches’ headlands.
So to the movement towards greater spontaneity - which I have designated as edge, Dickson’s recent work also incorporates more distinct local histories and topographies. That the two notions should both be linked in the contingency of his new techniques isn’t a surprise. The natural world of his local environment is volatile. What Dickson seems to like most is its transience - the view from his cliff-height house and studio is nothing if not mutable. Between tree, leaf, cloud, and the variant styles of roof, of brick and wooden house, the bustle of humans, and cars, and sails, speedboats’ wakes and wave swell on the water is the constant enactment of the strata of the Northern Beaches, and subjects in many of Dickson’s pieces. Not surprisingly the convergence of those literal strata and edge adds another stratigraphic moment to his work.

A growing maturity features solidly in all the work. Stratification, edge, sedimentation, topography, histories local and personal. There are cracks, fissures or sutures along some edges, or elsewhere more decisively made punctures, slashes, even tears on the surfaces. These seem at times contrapuntally at odds with the crisply made tesserae, or, the toasted crumbles of natural looking clays or, the absolute clarity of the molten enamel poolings of other pieces or parts of pieces. That contra-position is of course what heightens the interest for me. Sure, each effect is in itself technically and sublimely beautiful. The edginess of the surface and its transition to the other surface is most noted at this point of breakdown. I have also argued that at this location Dickson’s hand and the risky evolution of the piece are both evident -and that this is an important issue in the meaning/effect of the piece, and as gesture of artistry. As well such edges show that the surface layer is a product of its basis in a clay product - itself treated, moulded pummelled, layered, worked and fired. What is seen is not mere surface - but the sediments which build up to make the surface possible - the edginess is thereby metaphor for the meaning of these works as the strata of the creative act.

The multiplication of edge is seen in a number of new works including The Whakapapa Staff, and Family Canoe. Some earlier diptychs juxtaposed edges and surfaces against each other across two distinct plates. In these recent works two plates have been multiplied into polyptychs where several and distinctly different shaped platters or plaques build into a ‘single’ work. In the case of the Staff and the Canoe, the titles also allude to the genealogy staffs and the iconic foundation myths of the Maori canoe, respectively, and demonstrate Dickson’s exploration of the connection between his European heritage and the indigenous cultures of his country of origin. His narrative is then not so clear cut as his titles might apply. But that is the point of the edgy technique. Indeed these new polyptychs utter a kind of poly-vocal discourse (following Bahktin), in which no single utterance is paramount or favoured.

I think that this is Dickson’s solution to where to take his desire, as I see it, for even more stratification and edginess. True, each ‘singular piece’ presents the new broken stratification, but each is largely resolved within its own formal constraints and that it is a record of its own production. Instead of this kind of resolution these new poly-pieces are like anti-symphonies in which multiple themes, motifs, and melodies compete rather than coalesce. Perhaps the better metaphor is that they are made by multiple hands, each a different layer of the story but so removed from the other pieces that this edge is unresolvable - as a way of genuinely capturing an even greater sense of the creative process - its multiplicity of focus or its plurality of communicating ideas.

Intensity, technical analysis, and formal innovation are qualities evident in recent works and equally directly continuous with his early work - but there has been a significant evolution in the past decade - a festival spread from a maturing practice and a deepening vision.

The combination of intellectual and emotional strength halts the vision - that moment’s ‘freeze’ of the eye/hand nexus in the presence of great art. A privilege to be allowed - so many instants on the precipice of time’s stratified edge.