Marmalade Issue 5, 2017

In Australia, it was in the aftermath of the Second World
War that all the components of what we think of as the
modern Crafts Movement appeared and ceramics was at
the forefront of this new approach to a very old craft. Small
workshops flourished, courses began to appear and ceramics
began to be seen in mainstream art galleries, often as the
accompaniment to an exhibition of paintings but sometimes
as the major feature, as in the ground-breaking work made
by David and Hermia Boyd who had sell-out shows and
achieved great notoriety through the exhibitions of their
ceramics in the 1950s.
This pattern increased throughout the 1960s (which
interestingly was also a period of social change) and by the
early seventies ceramics, and the Crafts in general, played a
prominent part in Australian cultural life.
Governments became increasingly involved in arts funding,
with a dedicated federal crafts-funding body and state-based
boards, and ceramics was a significant beneficiary of this
largesse. Ceramics courses proliferated within art schools,
TAFE and other adult education courses, ceramics was
taught in schools and numerous practitioners established
successful careers built on the back of a wide public interest
in the field. This was the climate which allowed for the birth of
JamFactory, a visionary organisation which can truly claim to
be ‘innovative’ and is a model which has yet to be reproduced
in this country, let alone bettered.
Nonetheless, it’s true to say that throughout the eighties
and nineties, away from nurturing environments such as
that provided by JamFactory, something happened, and the
interest in ceramics waned. Perhaps it was the extraordinary
growth of digital technologies and a strong bias towards
conceptualism in the art world (and particularly in art
education) that made the manipulation of mud, no matter
how skilful, seem somehow redundant, too ‘old school’.
Institutions like JamFactory with its long commitment to
ceramics, persisted, but there was a diminishment of teaching
within the tertiary sector and Australia-wide the penetration
of hand-crafted ceramics in the broader public sphere
was lessened.
It’s always hard to judge these things accurately, but in the
late nineties and into the 2000s ceramics began to gather
strength again: the impetus was coming from somewhere,
but the question was where?
My observation is that the trend towards ceramics’ newfound
popularity had several points of reference and that
these were fortuitously coincidental.
One explanation was the unprecedented rise to fame of
the Australian ceramic artist (I’m sure she would have been
happier being called a potter), Gwyn Hanssen Pigott in the
1980s. After a long career in both England and Australia as
a maker of lovely, but rather underappreciated domestic
wares, Hanssen Pigott created what amounted to a new way
of looking at ceramics – a ‘still life’. At once the objects and
their depiction, packaged in an exquisite, seemingly simple
moment – they took the art world by storm. Hanssen Pigott
became properly famous and her elevation of the humble,
well-crafted, beautifully-realised pot provided a muchneeded
shot in the arm for ceramics, proof that success was
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