Marmalade Issue 5, 2017

attainable at a level that was previously the province of other,
more mainstream visual arts practices.
Once it became obvious that one person could do it, others
followed, with many (some rather too closely) emulating her
approach and others finding new ways to interpret age-old
traditions, with the corollary being that ceramics once again
began to gain much-needed traction.
Other international artists found wide audiences through
the medium of clay, with two, very different, English artists,
Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal, doing much to raise the
profile of ceramics around the turn of the new century.
However, the final ingredient (and I use that term very
deliberately) was to be found in a place that was both
unexpected and yet blindingly obvious: it was in food and the
connection between the table and the plate, what the great
Mexican writer Octavio Paz refers to when he wrote:
In its perpetual movement back and forth between beauty
and utility, pleasure and service, the work of craftsmanship
teaches us lessons in sociability.
My first contact with this phenomenon came about in 2002
when the chef and writer Gay Bilson approached me to work
on a culinary project for the Adelaide Festival of Arts. There
were two components: one entailed making some plates
for a conference of gastronomy, the other a few hundred
small bowls which would be used to serve meals she had
prepared to patients in a hospital, thus upending a long and
proud health-care tradition of inedible food served up on
unappealing crockery.
Jacob’s Creek restaurant with tableware – and the demand
just seems to increase each year.
Away from JamFactory, many talented makers – Colin
Hopkins and Illona Topolcsanyi from Cone11 pottery
in Melbourne, Ben Richardson in Hobart and Malcolm
Greenwood in New South Wales to name just a few – supply
some of the best restaurants in the country, and the ‘trickle
down’ effect has been profound.
Finally, one cannot ignore the advent of online retailing,
with its global reach and its ability to facilitate makers who
are able to work at a scale and pace which they themselves
control, with the inherent saving over more traditional ‘bricks
and mortar’ outlets.
What is fascinating is that none of these components seem
to be at odds with each other: the greater the interest in the
field the more makers seem to respond, and more makers
means a greater public awareness of hand-made ceramics –
and so it goes.
In fact, ‘making’ in all its permutations is, as the current
expression would have it, ‘a thing’. Ceramics, that age-old
tradition, has reinvented itself, and it is a pleasure and an
honour to observe this phenomenon close-up, and to be part
of an organisation that has, since its very inception, helped
lead the change.
Previous page: Ilona Topolcsanyi at Cone 11 Pottery Studio.
Photo courtesy of Cone 11.
Left: Cone 11 Pottery Studio. Photo courtesy of Cone 11.
Around the country, other chefs of equal standing had also
begun to explore the aesthetic and functional possibilities
of ‘bespoke’, hand-made crockery, and it’s true to say that
the impetus for the infiltration of hand-made ceramics into
restaurants has been almost entirely ‘top-down’, and now the
list of restaurants using such work reads like a compendium
from an antipodean equivalent of the
Michelin guide.
One of my very first calls when I began as Creative Director
of the Ceramics Studio at JamFactory was to arrange
a visit to Penfolds’s Magill Estate Restaurant, where the
executive chefs, Scott Huggins and Emma McCaskill,
commissioned a full setting for their degustation menu.
Such is the relationship we built with Huggins and McCaskill
that JamFactory Ceramics Studio Associates Jordan Gower,
Ashlee Hopkins and Ebony Heidenreich now supply work to
both Huggins at Magill Estate and McCaskill in her new role as
head chef at The Pot restaurant.
Another recent project undertaken by JamFactory Ceramics
Associate Ashlee Hopkins was a commission to make
tableware for Barossa Valley restaurant, Hentley Farm, for
their Gourmet Traveller Top 50 event and the JamFactory
studio has also supplied both Fino at Seppleltsfield and
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