About
I remember the first time I touched clay. Below the pebble strewn sand of the Swan Point beach, it was soft, grey and pliable and I made tiny vases while my brothers made tunnels through the sand.
Many years later several Adult Education classes wetted my appetite but it wasn’t until the mid 80’s my clay addiction really began, with TAFE, then Art School and the building of my first studio.
At this time my membership of what was then The Potters Society opened up new worlds of possibilities through the many workshops given by visiting ceramicists. One of the most inspirational was Canadian Matthias Ostermann, whose maiolica decoration introduced me to terracotta and colour. Even now I keep coming back to maiolica, despite it not being the “fashion statement” that it was in the 80’s. A preferred addition is gold lustre.
My ceramics range also includes terracotta with various blue glazes, white earthenware with printed blue decoration and Southern ice and lumina porcelain, water-etched or drawn on with blue underglaze pencil.
In 2008 I began to explore another medium. Needing to rest my back and wrists, and desiring to work with more colour, I discovered felting. Felting, unlike pottery, is soft, light and immediate. With colour what you see is what you get (apart from the shrinkage!) It is supportive of quite a different side of my artistic temperament.
I am adding to this in 2022. I still have my felting materials, and intend to get back to it at some point, but it is pottery that absorbs me the most, the feel of the clay, and the ability to create something that people can use in the home and in particular for food or drink. I am primarily a maker of decorative tableware.
Large slab platters are amongst my favourite forms, with transfer decorated patterns on the surface, often landscape related. I also produce a range of thrown teabowls, bowls and mugs with transfer collage surfaces, coasters and buttons.
In recent years I have discovered anew the joy of pinch pots. I have now made many small pinched bowls, the process a meditation. From this has evolved my “endangered species” and “bleached coral” series as well as “conus” and “nautilus”, based on shell forms. These are pinch pots with a difference, the exterior fluted or spiked, the surface lustrous from a raku firing or intricately patterned with underglaze pencil. This work closely relates to my concern for our environment and love of nature.
I run small pottery classes in my studio in Lindisfarne and am a Life Member and committee member of the Tasmanian Ceramics Association in which I am the organiser of Maude’s Mud Muster in Bothwell in September and “Windows in June”.
You will always find my work in Off Centre, the collective which I established with 7 others in 1999 and which has been downstairs in Salamanca Arts Centre since 2011.