In the article Pot Luck? Journal of Australian Ceramics, Pottery in Australia, 44#3, 2005), author Laura McEwan examines issues of narrowness and predictability in relation to decision making and the awarding of ceramic prizes. Though pertinent, such issues are perhaps a degree inevitable in a country where the practitioner base is relatively small and opportunities limited. Besides, Australians like awards and titles, competitive sports are popular, and reality TV, based on competition, judgement and ostracism, is a national addiction. Nations are known for their addictions, and McEwan’s title, Pot Luck?, suggests that awards, like sports, are related to Australian’s love of gambling.

Whatever the questions of predictability, or restrictiveness, in awards, most of us would acknowledge the roles that awards play in advocacy and in stimulating the sector. Garth Clark, for one, urges potters to band together to re-launch the concept of the handmade pot; he is quoted as saying “Audiences need to recognise the brilliance of a performance and reward it accordingly”1. This point parallels closely the work of awards in seeking out and promoting achievements.
Within the context of the Australian scene the South Australian Ceramics Award is a highlight for SA based practitioners. With the next award coming up in early 2007, it might be worth looking at recent results.
The 2005 Award presented works by thirty-one SA practitioners, and was the seventh award since

(left) Kirsten Coelho, untitled, 2004, porcelain, matt white glaze, iron banded rim, h.9.5cm, w.18cm
Gerry Wedd, Arcadian Still Life, 2004, wheel thrown, cobalt decorated, h.21cm, w.49cm, d.5cm

establishment by the SA Potters Guild in 1986. The award is a $3,000 acquisitive prize, with up to a further $2,000 provided by the Potters Guild to the Art Gallery of South Australia to buy work for their collection.

For 2005, the judge was Bruce Nuske, a respected and established, ceramic artist. Nuske awarded the prize to Leo Neuhofer, for Moire - a large, hand-built, sculptural, floor piece. Neuhofer, an established practitioner, has a style and approach that is distinctive. His investigations - as represented by the Moire piece - consist of self-conscious structural grids, nets and fish trap forms, in homage to Aboriginal crafts of necessity. These works are a sustained and considered series, underpinned by a restless capacity for drawing.

Nuske’s selection of Moire was not without comment. Some observers, including respected writer and leading critic, Margot Osborne, viewed the work in a less than optimistic light, and did not share Nuske’s enthusiasm for the piece. It is true that, scale aside, Moire did little to explore materials and techniques beyond Leo’s established territory. The notion of a free-standing, sculptural, ceramic work does not make for an obvious extension of audience experience, though it would have been interesting to see Moire accompanied by working drawings and interpretive material, to draw out the interplay of hunter/gather functional forms, as opposed to the purely formal intentions of his
edifice-like pieces.

While it is not particularly fashionable nowadays to tackle realistic or representational sculptural figurative works, Freya Povey submitted a semi-classical and mask-like head of Gloriana, as Queen Elizabeth I of England became known. This archaised and stylised portrait bust derived from Povey’s long fascination with absolute queens, renegade divas, giddy goddesses and other iconic, but sadly fictive, fantasy figure-heads.

Povey has become increasingly fascinated with Elizabeth I, studying Tudor court portraits and paintings, watching Cate Blanchett’s portrayal many times, before finally using Blackwattle white paper clay which, after bisquing, was painted with slurry made from Feeney’s Red Raku clay. This was then washed off, before sponging on a layer in Northcote Pottery’s white clay, to imitate the Tudor queen’s lethal white, lead-based, farded make over 2.

Not all works in the Award were hand-built. With ovoid precision, wheel work creates circles - feet, bellies, necks, mouths and lips appear. The myth and appeal of vessel forms, their fascination with enclosure, fecundity and notions of provision and self-sufficiency, informed a number of pieces. Danny Murphy’s robust, almost overly full, thrown form subverted its animal and amniotic associations with a loose geometric covering of flower and leaf pattern in sgraffito.

Presentation of grouped collections of objects is so commonplace nowadays, that it verges on the tiresome, but this exhibition offered some idiosyncratic takes on the formulae. Gerry Wedd pushed the conceit of the collected assemblage with his suitably ambitious Arcadian Still Life, which reached into the cool, blue shadows of familiar forms to reveal the life that drifts on the margins and stumbles in the potholes. Gerry’s works are increasingly winning acclaim, with several pieces recently reserved by the National Gallery.

Robin Best resorts frequently to the opportunities that groupings offer, and her Still Life With Wiraku - completed in collaboration with indigenous artist, Nyukana Baker, from Ernabella - is typical. A smoothly meditative piece of cultural hybridity with deceptively simple forms, revealing the subtleties of flattened and foreshortened vessels taken from ‘democratic’ origins of mass production, slip-casting techniques, blended with the more ‘elitist’ associations of ancient cultures, their patterns and designs.

Robin’s work style implies a peripatetic model that few potters attain. At the time of writing she was based in China, selling sets of ‘snuff bottles’ through galleries like Madame Mao’s and Eastlink in Shanghai, but indicated that the vast and teeming subcontinent of India may be her next destination. and source of inspiration, saying she is interested in the resonance of patterns developed in India for English markets.

Some works stood apart for their honesty and exquisite beauty. Kirsten Coehlo’s iron-banded, matt white, porcelain forms function as objects of simple utility, yet their deliberately stained and resoundingly silent porcelain condition offers conceptual richness. Coehlo’s classically poised and lapidary vessels, rimmed with an expressive decay of heat-diffused iron, juxtapose domestic notions of contentment and preservation against ideas of elemental change and transience.
Coehlo’s pots are a species of architectural porcelain for the tabletop, to be enjoyed as sculptural shapes and useful forms, within the tableau of domestic space. Like so much that is compelling in contemporary Australian craft, these sophisticated porcelain pots are a fusion of oriental sensibility and occidental design influences.

I asked Jan Twyerould, principal organiser for the Award, if she thought that there was a problem concerning issues of narrowness or predictability in relation to the South Australian ceramic awards. Jan replied “Not at all. It was suggested after the first Award in 1988, having it open only to South Australians would not work -
it would start looking incestuous; but that just hasn’t happened. Each show has been surprisingly different, always finding emerging ceramists and others producing new pieces. Having been connected with all Award exhibitions, I have found each to be different and exciting. I am encouraged by the ceramics being produced in SA, even in these difficult times for clay workers. The 2007 Award will be inspirational”.

The next South Australian Ceramic Award will run 2 March to 25 March 2007, with entries closing 2 February 2007. It will be open to clay workers resident in South Australia, who are invited to submit slides for selection.

Notes:
1 Garth Clark quoted by Madeline King in her article “for skyaspirers”, Journal of Australian Ceramics, Pottery in Australia, 44#3 2005.
2 It is interesting to compare Povey’s imagined portrait of the Queen with that of an eyewitness account. Andre Hurault, the French Ambassador to the Tudor court was one who, on December 8 1597, had a private audience with “Gloriana”.
He recorded his impressions thus: “She was strangely attired in a dress of silver cloth, white and crimson, or silver ‘gauze’, as they call it. This dress had slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta, and was girt about with other little sleeves that hung down to the ground, which she was forever twisting and untwisting. She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot. The collar of the robe was very high, and the lining of the inner part all adorned with little pendants of rubies and pearls, very many, but quite small. She had also a chain of rubies and pearls about her neck. On her head she wore a garland of the same material and beneath it a great reddish-coloured wig, with a great number of spangles of gold and silver, and hanging down over her forehead some pearls, but of no great worth. On either side of her ears hung two great curls of hair, almost down to her shoulders and within the collar of her robe, spangled as the top of her head. Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled as well as one can see for the collar that she wears round her neck, but lower down her flesh is exceedingly white and delicate, so far as one could see.
As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly. Her figure is fair and tall and graceful in whatever she does; so far as may be she keeps her dignity, yet humbly and graciously withal.”

Stephen Bowers is a potter and is currently Managing Director of the Jamfactory Contemporary Craft and Design in Adelaide South Australia, and a Field Research Officer with the Australasian Institute of Backyard Studies.