All my life I have loved to draw the world around me, on every subject and surface imaginable. Stories, music, myth and legend are also longstanding passions, and so the ‘story pots’ of the past from ancient cultures, for example Etruscan or Persian or Aztec, hold a magic appeal for me. During travels and visits to major museums I have been repeatedly impressed by the fabulous charisma of these pots, with their inventiveness and liveliness of drawing and powerful form. Because making images on clay is an important part of my work, these artists from long ago have unknowingly become my mentors.

In the Eighties, studying Drawing, Painting and Printmaking at Victoria College, Prahran, I fell in love with the subtleties of form and positive and negative space in the work of artists such as Matisse, Van Gogh, Morandi and Giacometti. Other strong influences were Japanese woodblock prints, and the boldness of early 20th century Expressionist painters such as Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger. Studying ceramics and sculpture at Melbourne University later during education studies introduced me to the world of three-dimensional form. Most of my artistic output until recently has combined drawing, printmaking, collage and mixed-media painting, with a little coil-built clay sculpture.

Since inheriting my mother’s small electric kiln about seven years ago, ceramics has claimed me and one of my daughters. Further ceramic studies at Box Hill and Chisholm Institutes of TAFE, and the ANU in Canberra, have kept me happily embroiled in learning about the materials and methods of clay and glaze. I am entranced by wheel throwing and the alchemy of glazes when they meet, overlap and melt in various conditions on different clays at high temperatures in my elderly gas kiln.

Meanwhile, my old urge to combine the elements of form, image and surface is always there. These elements each have their own particular dynamic. It seems to me that most ceramic artists choose to concentrate on a single one of these. Those who combine them do so by making one element dominant, and minimising others, yet in Archaic art and in the pottery,

Top: City of Souls, wheel thrown, terracotta, white and oxide-coloured engobes, glaze, 1100ºC, h.80cm

Right: Love is in the Air, wheel thrown porcelain, sgraffito and incised, black engobe, glaze, 1280ºC reduction, h.40cm

Journey through Urbia, wheel thrown, dark stoneware clay, fritted engobe, 1280ºC reduction, h.80cm; (detail)

Because this is an area that begs to be explored further, I have recently been undertaking my own investigations of what I will call the ‘ceramic canvas’, through the Extension Program at Chisholm Institute in Dandenong. I am exploring the pictorial possibilities of a three-dimensional surface. A wise tutor suggested to me that if drawing was to be the most important aspect of my work, it might be wise to avoid glaze, as it often obscures or alters an image. This was excellent advice, and so true. Yet I really want to use the sumptuousness of glaze to produce surfaces as rich as those of the old pots. The forms must contain powerful positive and negative spaces (the shape of the space around the object being as important as the form itself), since they are to be used as ‘canvases in the round’. The roundness of the object necessitates its turning, in order to see all the images sequentially. I aim to create the feeling of figures moving through the landscape, using decorative elements such as rims, ridges, borders and abstraction in a contemporary way, both to emphasise different parts of the shape and to lead the eye around the picture.

These vessels represent the containment of ideas. They are about the journey through life to death, using the city and landscape as metaphor. Through these works I hold a visual conversation between modern times and the past. The drawings are inhabited with crowds and onlookers – lots of people, in cars, at traffic lights, sitting on buses, trains and trams, in parks, conversing at tables or walking, carried along with and often without volition – city buildings and traffic. People interact with unseen fates, gods and goddesses, and unfathomable factors are at work! The details are fragments of city life, intertwined with different layers of reality.

The forms combine wheel-thrown and hand-built features, and are joined and altered. Some, such as Daily Lives and Love is in the Air are white porcellaneous stoneware, painted with black slip and oxides, using either wax resist, or ‘sgraffito’ methods of scraping lines and broad areas through the black to expose white clay. A clear, translucent glaze has been used, which has ‘blued’ the black stain, and lent a mistiness to the drawing. In Journey through Urbia, a dark stoneware clay is overlaid with a white fritted engobe and high-fired in reduction, producing a shiny, glaze-like and darkened surface - sombre but interesting. City of Souls is terracotta, painted with white, iron and cobalt slips, and glazed in some areas to make these appear to be more dominant and to ‘come forward’. Fired at 1100°C this has produced the richest and most dramatic colours so far. It’s obvious that this investigation will occupy me for the next hundred years!

The age-old dilemma arises – the relative importance of function versus communication of ideas, a question which continues to occupy many artists and artisans. It seems to me that it is still valid to create works or situations which encourage reflection of the non-material.

Above right: Daily Lives, wheel thrown porcelain, black engobe, glaze, 1280ºC reduction, h.70cm