The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 51 No 3 November 2012

Now + Then
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the
Inner City Clayworkers Gallery. We think this
is a pretty good milestone; fancy still being here I
As a co-operative, the Gallery has had many
lives during this time. It is rather like Grandad's
axe - two new handles and four new axe heads,
but it is still Grandad's axe. The members have
come and gone, and the work has also changed
according to fashions in ceramics, but the Gallery
keeps on. An exhibition featuring many wellknown
names in the ceramics field, all of whom
have been members of Clayworkers, will be held
in November 2012; www.clayworkers.com.au
Announcing On the Edge of the Sheff,
a woodfire gathering to be held 25 April -
25 May 2014 at Mystery Bay in NSW.
A website is coming soon. The co-ordinator is
Daniel Lafferty; T: 02 6493 6724.
John Tuckwell, Carol Forster, and Tatiana
Gvozdetskaya have been selected in the
Ceramica Multiplex exhibition at the Fourth
International Festival of Postmodern Ceramics to
be held in Croatia from 25 August to 31 Odober
2012, and then Kapfenberg, Austria, from 16
November 2012 until 6 January 2013. More
than four hundred artists from around the world
submitted work for the exhibition.
Websites to check out:
http://pinterest.com!caroleepp/
technical-ceramics
http://wikiclay.com
Interested in when pottery was invented?
On 3 July 2012 on the Australian Ceramics
Email Discussion List, Owen Rye brought to our
attention this brief abstrad, which suggests that
the ea rliest pottery vessels were made in China
20,000 years ago.
Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong
Cave, China -
Abstrad: The invention of pottery introduced
fundamental shifts in human subsistence
practices and sociosymbolic behaviours. Here,
w e describe the dating of the early pottery f rom
Xianrendong Cave, j iangxi Province, China, and
the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts
of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples.
The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological
contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000
calendar years before the present 2000 to 3000
years older than other pottery found in East
Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave
demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile
foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late
Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as
cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery
was first made and used 10 millennia or more
before the emergence of agriculture.
To join the Australian Ceramics Email
Discussion List, please visit
www.australianceramics.com.click on
'conned + chat' and follow the instrudions.
Two new books on t he TACA office desk:
Lust re by Greg Daly; Ceramics Handbook Series,
$36.99, 128 pages, paperback; A & C Black,
2012; ISBN 9781 408103760
Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter by Emmanuel
Cooper; The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art, approx. $50, 384 pages, hardback;
Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300152005
Photo:
Lucille Noble2a
Refer to this webpage, www.sciencemag.org/
contentl336/6089/ 1696.abstract, which refers
to an article in the journal Science,
www.sciencemag.org; Science 29 June 2012;
Vol. 336 no. 6089 pp. 1696-1700.
4 THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS NOVEMBER 2012