Pottery In Australia Vol 39 No 4 December 2000

For Bruce McWhinney the natural elements of eanh,
wind, water and fire are the 'true makers' and it is the
elusive alchemy of the chance happening Ulal he seeks in
his work. In an earUer series of very disciplined objecl~ ,
he combined organic forms and formal geometry with
smooth surfaces and high colour (blue, red, green and
orange) to acknowledge the co-existence of architecture
and nature in our urban environment. He than began to
extend his ideas by making hemispherical seed pod
forms with surfaces carved in strongly figurative patterns
and named after Australian flora. [n this exhibition the
caving has been refined to a more srylistic representation
as ule anist stakes his claim to the Australian landscape.
Except for two fired and cratered pods and several bird
of paradise flashes, Ule colours of the elongated shields
hanging on the wall and conical shapes standing in line
are dark brown, blackened like charred eanh - 'All
TI,at's Left', bUnlt husks or fossils from an age when giant
marsupials roamed the ancient land of Tem Australis.
Bill Kelly's fascination with cultures past and present is
expressed in a series of shrine-like strucrures crenellated
and patterened in the manner of oriental temples and
layered with a patina of age. Each of the pieces is a
distillation of Kelly 's memori es of natu ral and
architectural landscapes and while they are not sacred
relics or objects of veneration, they do embody a sense
of an inner, spiritual space. However, Kelly insists that
any philosoph ical or religious content is secondary to the
technical requirements of working wit h mou lds,
mastering materials and firing techniques to create their
complex surface geometry. The seductive unstable
surfaces continue to change after firing, forming powdery
encru stations and preCipitates, reminiscent of Janet
Laurence's 'landscapes' of corrosion and errosion, quaSi
alchemical transformations of nature inro culture and
back again as civilizations crumble.
An ice age away are the cool sage green and powder
blue porcelains by Chris James and Betty Riddington.
James' cups, bowls, teapots and 'droplets' (pear shaped
vessels) have been innuenced by traditional glaze and
su rface tcchniques, but are entirely contemporary in ulcir
smoothly minimalist fonns . .lames' ea rlier cylindrical pots
in mall earth hound colours were about fantasies of
'somewhere in the outback' but James grew up near the
ocean and his love of, and fam iliari ry with, the marine
environment is evoked in the limpid colours and fluid
shapes of his work - even to the knobs on the lids
which echo rebound after-pebble splashes.
In this exhibition James' pieces have been honed to a
looking-glass surface. As Brancusi's elliptical marble and
bronze scul ptures - 'deflections of an ideal geometry
and polished to renective perfcction" - invite medita tion
Top: Bruce McWhinney, 'Fired Pod'.
h17x d22an
Above: Christopher James, translucent
porcelain cups.
but resist formal analysis, so James' deceptively simple
forms defy easy interpretation. Their slight deflection
from the ideal of cylinder and ellipse is just enough to
transpose them from the real more ulcoretical cenainty,
into the sometimes chancy world of working with clay.
Betty Riddington concentrates on surface decoration in
the elegant celadon colours of the Song Dynasry. Whilst
holdi ng form functional and respecting traditions, she
explores the intrinsic qualities of porcelain. In contrast to
Chris James, for whom throWing on the wheel is simply a
way of creating shapes, Hiddington enjoys the physical
process of throwing and the repetitive, rh ythmiC I
processes of carving. Living near the sea, she is also at
home in the water and this derives the wavelike pallenlS
carved on her bowls.
Diane McLean not onl y acknowledges humankind's
long history of ceramic production in work centred on the
'Venus of Willendorf', but also gives a contemporary
setting to the belief in the earth as a source of both female
strength and female stereoryping as biological destiny.
54 POTTfRY IN AusrRALIA + 39/4 DECEMBER 2000