Marmalade Issue 5, 2017
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attainable at a level that was previously the province of other,<br />
more mainstream visual arts practices.<br />
Once it became obvious that one person could do it, others<br />
followed, with many (some rather too closely) emulating her<br />
approach and others finding new ways to interpret age-old<br />
traditions, with the corollary being that ceramics once again<br />
began to gain much-needed traction.<br />
Other international artists found wide audiences through<br />
the medium of clay, with two, very different, English artists,<br />
Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal, doing much to raise the<br />
profile of ceramics around the turn of the new century.<br />
However, the final ingredient (and I use that term very<br />
deliberately) was to be found in a place that was both<br />
unexpected and yet blindingly obvious: it was in food and the<br />
connection between the table and the plate, what the great<br />
Mexican writer Octavio Paz refers to when he wrote:<br />
In its perpetual movement back and forth between beauty<br />
and utility, pleasure and service, the work of craftsmanship<br />
teaches us lessons in sociability.<br />
My first contact with this phenomenon came about in 2002<br />
when the chef and writer Gay Bilson approached me to work<br />
on a culinary project for the Adelaide Festival of Arts. There<br />
were two components: one entailed making some plates<br />
for a conference of gastronomy, the other a few hundred<br />
small bowls which would be used to serve meals she had<br />
prepared to patients in a hospital, thus upending a long and<br />
proud health-care tradition of inedible food served up on<br />
unappealing crockery.<br />
Jacob’s Creek restaurant with tableware – and the demand<br />
just seems to increase each year.<br />
Away from JamFactory, many talented makers – Colin<br />
Hopkins and Illona Topolcsanyi from Cone11 pottery<br />
in Melbourne, Ben Richardson in Hobart and Malcolm<br />
Greenwood in New South Wales to name just a few – supply<br />
some of the best restaurants in the country, and the ‘trickle<br />
down’ effect has been profound.<br />
Finally, one cannot ignore the advent of online retailing,<br />
with its global reach and its ability to facilitate makers who<br />
are able to work at a scale and pace which they themselves<br />
control, with the inherent saving over more traditional ‘bricks<br />
and mortar’ outlets.<br />
What is fascinating is that none of these components seem<br />
to be at odds with each other: the greater the interest in the<br />
field the more makers seem to respond, and more makers<br />
means a greater public awareness of hand-made ceramics –<br />
and so it goes.<br />
In fact, ‘making’ in all its permutations is, as the current<br />
expression would have it, ‘a thing’. Ceramics, that age-old<br />
tradition, has reinvented itself, and it is a pleasure and an<br />
honour to observe this phenomenon close-up, and to be part<br />
of an organisation that has, since its very inception, helped<br />
lead the change.<br />
Previous page: Ilona Topolcsanyi at Cone 11 Pottery Studio.<br />
Photo courtesy of Cone 11.<br />
Left: Cone 11 Pottery Studio. Photo courtesy of Cone 11.<br />
Around the country, other chefs of equal standing had also<br />
begun to explore the aesthetic and functional possibilities<br />
of ‘bespoke’, hand-made crockery, and it’s true to say that<br />
the impetus for the infiltration of hand-made ceramics into<br />
restaurants has been almost entirely ‘top-down’, and now the<br />
list of restaurants using such work reads like a compendium<br />
from an antipodean equivalent of the<br />
Michelin guide.<br />
One of my very first calls when I began as Creative Director<br />
of the Ceramics Studio at JamFactory was to arrange<br />
a visit to Penfolds’s Magill Estate Restaurant, where the<br />
executive chefs, Scott Huggins and Emma McCaskill,<br />
commissioned a full setting for their degustation menu.<br />
Such is the relationship we built with Huggins and McCaskill<br />
that JamFactory Ceramics Studio Associates Jordan Gower,<br />
Ashlee Hopkins and Ebony Heidenreich now supply work to<br />
both Huggins at Magill Estate and McCaskill in her new role as<br />
head chef at The Pot restaurant.<br />
Another recent project undertaken by JamFactory Ceramics<br />
Associate Ashlee Hopkins was a commission to make<br />
tableware for Barossa Valley restaurant, Hentley Farm, for<br />
their Gourmet Traveller Top 50 event and the JamFactory<br />
studio has also supplied both Fino at Seppleltsfield and<br />
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