Sabbia is a lovely space, with gleaming old polished floorboards warming the all white walls, lit by both natural light from the large street front window and well mounted spots. When I visited the exhibition on a sunny Saturday afternoon, there was a steady stream of visitors with a sprinkling of accents denoting a healthy overseas presence. For all that, it was still a peaceful interlude in an otherwise pressured and busy week with viewers moving quietly between the pots catching, perhaps, some of the serenity and, for me, deeply grounding forces that emanate from works in clay.

All six of these potters produce very different works, approaching clays and glaze mediums in a vast range of different ways, but all are linked by their own abiding inspiration of the landscape around them. In all, I found there to be a fundamentally elemental yet transient voicing of process and movement in response to both materials and landscape. In the works of Sandy Lockwood the sense of a moment, caught and frozen in a split second of time, was palpable. Raw edges and delicate cracklings in the surfaces of the clay brought to mind the deeply etched basins of dried up waterholes in drought stricken outback lands. Lockwood says in her artist statement that clay ‘is a fantastic medium for capturing a fluid moment and holding it for all to see.'1 The use of salt glazes heightens this effect, hiding nothing of the process and added further subtle textures.

 

In stark contrast, both to the subtlety of Lockwood's delicate pieces and within themselves, are Paul Davis's flowing forms that explore the contrast between snow and the underlying landscape. Richly undulating and flowing forms are smothered in a thick, viscous white Rice-Ash glaze, which oozes, flows and puddles in thickly crackled excess over a pale, delicately textured clay body. The forms themselves are chunky and raw and it is only close inspection that reveals the texture within the clay itself, which is at odds both with the heavy, chunky forms and the glutinous quality of the glaze. Having seen images in the media of creeping lava during volcanic eruptions, I must say I found more parallels with the lava moving over land than my few memories of snow. However these are still satisfying pieces for the sheer honesty of the play of materials which is so evident.

Playing with chance and the elements in the fundamentally unpredictable area of wood firing, Janet Mansfield has produced pieces, which at first glance are within the conventional frameworks of what we expect of hand-made ceramics. And yet, due, in part to the firing processes, they are more than just pots, teapots and cups. The wood firing process pits the elements with and against each other in a volatile dance of fire, clay, ash and salt, which result in pieces of ageless character. The resultant distortions and seeming imperfections become the strengths of these pieces in a world where so much store is still set by uniformity and perfection. As Mansfield says in her artist statement, the risks of subjecting her pieces to such high temperatures in such a volatile process takes each piece right to the edge of the material's tolerance, and yet the results provide us with infinite variety within each piece so that there is always another facet of the surface to discover.

 

Jeff Mincham, Travelling North 2006, Multi-fired + Multi-glazed Stoneware, 
H 18 x W 42cm (photo: Michael Kluvanek)

Jeff Mincham works also with unpredictable firing methods in his raku work. Three of the pieces he chose to exhibit in this collection I found particularly intriguing as I see him move to explore a familiar form on a very different scale. Three of these works are based on the tea bowl forms with which he has been working for a very long time. But these are very large compared to his more traditional approach to the form. He creates abstracted landscapes with layers of different glaze materials. The result is a powerful sense of vastness and depth. In his retrospective in Adelaide's Jam Factory in 2004, there were a number of smaller tea bowls with similarly striated glaze applications, suggesting the layers of the landscape as it recedes into the distance. The sheer scale of these new, larger pieces leaves the viewer in no doubt as to the vastness of the landscape which is Mincham's world.

In complete contrast to the earthy vastness of Mincham's outsized tea bowls are Simone Fraser's highly colourful and textured vessels. These demand attention from the minute one enters the exhibition space. Amongst the earthy tones of the other potters' works, these almost neon, complex vessels tell a very different of landscape and history. Fraser writes that she is influenced by both historical and contemporary factors and speaks of antiquity being ‘rich with historic footprints of life events past.'2 In the carved, painted, scraped and layered surfaces on these vessel forms, it is possible to sense the storytelling behind each piece—winding tracks and paths, strings of beads, the people connected by the progress through different time zones and places. The vessel is Fraser's major vehicle for carrying these richly decorative surfaces and the distortions within the overall shapes suggest malleability in people through history as they experience events and each other.

Gail Nichols's pots are a quiet yet powerful voice within this collection of work. The artist says she is concerned with creating beautiful objects—beyond being merely pretty things for people to look at. She experiments with the contrasts between open and closed forms that carry a tangible sense of her hands having not long left the surface of the piece. Rich glazes with delicate speckles follow the sensuous curves of the pieces, which beg to be touched and stroked.

Vessel forms have long been the traditional vehicle for the potter—from those strictly utilitarian water carriers and cooking pots to the art pieces we see more of amongst contemporary practitioners. In this exhibition, the forms have been largely used to carry the deeply held philosophies and ideas about landscape and time passing, that which can be carried or contained and that which passes all boundaries of the man made. The differences between the artists' works are met with the commonality of their love and respect for their medium of choice and the underlying connection to landscape which informs much of the work in the exhibition.

References

1 Lockwood, S. Unpublished artist statement, 2007

2 Fraser, S. Unpublished artist statement, 2007