We are 1 1/2 hour drive south of Sydney. Please join us for our 1/2 price, Xmas sale, where everything in the gallery will be sold at 50% off! One day only. Sunday 14th December.
No tricks or gimmicks. Everything will be for sale at half of the usual marked price.
This is a definite once-off event.
We pride our selves on making highly sustainable ceramics, fired using PV sunshine or our own home grown timber. All our clay bodies and glazes are home made, on-site. We also offer tours of our workshop.
Please consider calling in and doing some discount priced Xmas Shopping.
We have never done this kind of thing before. It’s all new to us. Please come and take advantage of us!
We will also have a few of our friends with us;
Karen, who will be displaying her hand made jewellery. Roxanne, who will be showing some of her impressionistic paintings of my pots, and our son Geordie, who will be selling his hand made fruit cordials. Made from the organically grown fruit in our orchard and other fruit from local orchards.
Tours of the gardens and orchards will be available.
The Pottery studio and gardens.
Our son Geordie, making some of his ‘adult’ cordials.
Karen’s jewellery display.
Roxanne’s beautiful and expressionistic paintings of pots.
It’s the last days of spring, and I have been very busy doing all sorts of little jobs that have been waiting for me to find some ‘spare’ time. We were so flat out busy working in the pottery leading up to the open Studios weekends. Now it’s time for other things.
Although it’s still spring, it seems like summer has been with us here in Balmoral Village for the past 6 weeks and more. The lush green spring growth is long gone. It’s been hot and dry, interspersed with cold, blustery, windy days. The net effect has been to dry everything out. The paddocks and lawn around the house have browned off. The soil in the vegetable garden has dried out to the point of shrinking, and starting to crack open in the places where we are not watering the nascent, emerging seedlings, destined to become our summer food source. We keep the soil moist around the seedlings and let the other areas stay dry – until I need that spot to plant more vegetables.
We have spent years nurturing the local soil here. Improving it with multiple applications of compost and manure, interspersed with additions of lime and dolomite. Over the decades, the depth of the fertile, friable topsoil has increased to over 300 mm.possibly more in places. I never seem to hit the hard iron stone and sandy loam layer anymore. The worms take the organic matter down deep and mix it well. I just keep adding compost to the top as a fertilising mulch.
It was a real shock and learning experience to discover how effective worms are at disseminating organic matter down through soil to amazing depths, given time and repeated applications of organic matter/compost. After the bad fires here in 2019, our orchard trees got very badly burnt, so I decided to move the orchard up closer to the street and to build the new pottery on the old orchard site. When we started to dig out the stumps of the 45 year old fruit trees, I was amazed that the rick chocolate brown top soil when down half a metre or more. When I planted those trees in 1976, the holes I dug for each tree were dug through hard yellow stoney loam. What a change in the soil profile over those years. Thank you worms.
The zucchinis are starting to produce well now. They come on quite fast from seedlings to fruiting in a few weeks in this warm weather. I have been picking them small with the flower still on and stuffing the flowers with cottage cheese and herbs for a light fun dinner.
We also have plenty of silver beet/chard at the moment, although it is starting to bolt with the longer days. I have planted more seeds for a follow-on crop. I have been making spanakopita-like spinach and cheese triangles, or spanapotterka as I like to call them, or sometimes whole pies with a similar filling. It’s a great way to use up our excess of leafy greens, as they bolt away in the heat, and maximise our return from them before they are all gone. but it does need the ricotta, fetta, blue cheese and herbs mix to make it special. Plus a light touch of chilli.
I have also been making a few fruit tarts as well. Something for a more relaxed and comforting morning tea. Since the Open Studio sales are over and the 50% off Xmas sale hasn’t happened yet. Not until the 14th of December. The pottery is all cleaned out and set up for sales, I don’t want to mess it all up making more pots just now, as we still have plenty of stock. So I have time in the garden and kitchen catch up and do a lot of things that I like to do, but haven’t had the time to fit in, until now.
We have picked the last of the artichokes and cauliflowers. I made a vegetable pasta with the artichoke hearts and as the cauliflower was so far gone. I mashed it up and used it as vegetable filling to bulk out the sauce with last summer’s tomato passata.
This week we picked the last of the cherries and the first of the apricots.
I like working in the garden, especially in the warmth of the season, before it gets too hot. Everything responds so well and so fast at this time of year. There is always some fragrance in the air and birdsong on the wind, often fighting over the last of the high fruit in the mulberry tree or some other treasured and favoured food source. They squabble and chatter and squark and carry on, endless entertainment.
While in the garden, I noticed that one of the ancient wooden barrels that I bought 3rd, or even 4th hand, some 30 years ago, have finally rotted away to the point of collapsing. The staves have rotted away from the inside with the constant wetting and drying as we water the blueberries that we are growing in them.
I hate to see waste, so I made one of the rotted staves into a textured pottery tool. A paddle for creating texture while changing the shape of a larger pot. I’m teaching a weekend workshop of tool making next weekend, so this can be one of the projects. i have lots of these old textured staves now. I had to shape and add and new wooden baton, to reinforced and strengthen the handle. A rewarding project that avoids waste and recycles some old timber into something useful and precious. I love the natural, organic texture of the old weathered wood.
Once that was done I set to and cut, folded and rolled a new galvanised steel sheet ring to slide over the old soil base to keep the bush alive. I slipped the ring up and over the bush, down around the soil base. I made the new ring to be just 50mm larger in diameter to make the job easy. It fitted perfectly! I filled the small gap around the edge with some light soil and compost mix, eventually watering it all in to settle it down. It cost me about $30 to make this new steel pot, and it was quick and easy, as I didn’t need to move the plant and all its soil. A new 1/2 wine barrel would cost a couple of hundred dollars these days. So out of our budget range. $30 seems cheap to me for a 750mm dia garden pot, 400 mm high.
This new steel pot isn’t as beautiful, rustic and weathered as the old wooden barrels. The wood has a certain ‘natural’ beauty that I love, but I ask myself. “Are they 6 times better?” Possibly? But then I think of trying to lift the 100kgs of soil and root ball up and into a new wooden pot. I couldn’t do it anymore. So I’m playing it safe. I’m happy with the new pot.
Of course work in the pottery is never completely over. We have a summer school and other throwing weekend workshops booked in for the new year, so It’s time to make more clay body to get it all laid down and ageing, ready for when it’s needed in the new year. Our pottery workshop is laid out in such a way that the creative side is quite seperate from the more dusty, noisey, messy side of the business where we crush and grind all our glaze materials and make our clay bodies.
Janine and I have processed over a tonne of clay this year through our equipment. Each batch that we make is unique. As we do everything ourselves, we can make each batch of clay slightly different in order to closely match the type of projects that we are planning to make. This latest batch is slightly coarser in texture to facilitate making larger forms. The added grit helps the clay to stand up better in larger forms. We also make fine stoneware as well as porcelain.
After all the clay is processed, pugged twice and then bagged and put to bed, everything is scrubbed down and the floor is mopped.
I like to keep the workshop as dust free as is possible. After a change of water and a 2nd mopping, the big roller doors at each end of the workshop are opened up and the breeze flows through and drys the floor.
We are good now for the next 3 months. We are very lucky to have such good equipment that allows us to make large amounts of clay like this in a couple of days. All this gear is very old and has had a difficult history. But I manage to keep it all going, maintaining it as best as I can, cobbling together disparate parts and spares from here and there and making up special bits where they aren’t available any more. Its a challenge, and rewarding when it all works.
Nothing is even finished, nothing is ever perfect, and nothing lasts.
The pottery and its garden are looking great just now and for the next few weeks. All the spring flowers are coming out, just in time for the Open Studio weekends.
We are firing both electric kilns every day for the past week. We are getting all of the final glaze firings done. Working like a well oiled machine. We have been so lucky, that the sun has been shining bright every day – until today. It’s overcast with just a few spots of drizzly rain now and then. Just enough to stop me wanting to go out and do some gardening. I have two more firings on. One stoneware and one gold lustre firing. It’s all coming together.
We have managed to do all our firings on sunshine up until this afternoon, when it had turned quite overcast. Not only have we managed to glaze everything with our own electricity, but I have been careful to manage it so that I have kept both electric cars fully charged, at the same time and still been able to sell just a little of our occasional excess back to the grid to cover our daily access charges. It’s important to me to live a green, low carbon, passive, low energy, non polluting, life of minimal consumption, and we are doing it. We are managing it pretty well. But this afternoon, I will be withdrawing some expensive ‘green’ sustainable energy from the grid, for the last 3 hours of these current firings.
I have been experimenting with some new coloured pastel slips that I developed before we went to WA for the conference. See my previous post; More rain and tasting cider, Posted on
I weighed out almost 300 different pastel tones of stoneware slips.
Using these colours, I tried making some new square plates, with a Korean inspired ‘Bojagi’ traditional fabric design. I’m very pleased with them, for a first attempt. I quite like the one were I ‘channel’ Piet Mondrian. Mondrianic bojagi!
I have also been making some more Korean inspired ‘Moon Jars’, but with an Australian twist. No photos yet, that are still in the kilns.
Please call in to see us on the next two weekends 1st/2nd and the 8th/9th of November. We will have tea or coffee and even cake for the first in and best fed.
In the kitchen, I’ve been harvesting lots of leaks, and making chicken and leak pie. I’ve got quite quick at knocking up small batches of wholemeal pastry for pie crusts and pizza bases.
We may be very busy in the pottery, but there is always time to raid the garden for food for dinner and to cook up something wholesome and delicious for dinner.
I just planted out the first few tomatoes seedlings. It’s still a little bit early, but I like to get an early start. It doesn’t always work out well, but worth a try, to get a ripe red tomatoes before Xmas. Last year, my early plantings all ended up shrivelled by a late frost. Such is life! It doesn’t stop me trying. A sure fire way to know that it’s the right time is when I see the wild, self-sown seeds start to pop up. But that will be another month yet.
I’ve just finished reading two books on AI. I thought that I should get myself informed in some small way, as it is coming fast and we are told will be part of almost everything that we do in no time at all. When I was working in Korea back in April/May, everyone in my circle was using it in some way. Most on their phones as recreation, others having to take courses as part of their workplace training. Some as a requirement of their studies. It was everywhere in my environment, daily experiences and exchanges with my cohort. I’m not that interested in using it. I even have ’siri’ switched off. But sure enough, I will probably be forced to engage with it at some time, – probably sooner than I imagine. I’m not a Luddite, but I’m not rushing in either. It will come soon enough, or so I’m told. I can’t see it helping me to pack the kiln, or weed the vegetables!
Richard Susskind has spent his entire life working on AI. From his Doctorate on AI at Oxford in 1980 right up until the present time, it has been his complete lifes focus. He expresses some caution, but overall, I got the impression that he is pretty ‘gung-ho’ about its potential and trajectory. As someone who has been completely immersed in its development, he feels that any shortcomings can and will be managed and overcome to make it the servant of humanity.
Harari on the other hand, as a scholar of the history of information technology. He also received his PhD from Oxford. He is quite sceptical and is very cautious about what might happen. He is not involved in any AI development. He simply looks at what has happened in the past with the development and implementation of past information technologies.
His book takes us on a long journey from the stone-age through the Bible, the witch hunts to Stalinism and on to modern popularism, and how every new technology has been coopted for individual gain, power and profit.
After reading Susskind I was a little better informed, but still perplexed. After reading Harari, I’m not exactly scared, but certainly concerned. I am at least better informed. I didn’t sit down and read them cover to cover. I read them chapter by chapter, one or two each evening. I’d rather be outside gardening if the weather is nice, or inside potting when it’s not, as these are the things that bring me the greatest pleasure. The luxury of reading is an after-dinner activity, where it has to compete with sowing patches on my worn out clothes, or watching the idiot box, on the rare occasion when there is something worth watching. So it’s taken me a month to read them both, and over that time, my attention has fallen on various articles in the news, concerning AI.
Yesterday, I read that Australian tech billionaire, Scott Farquhar wants unfettered access to all copyright material free of charge to train AI Large Language Models. He claims that AI will deliver $115 billion in productivity gains. If it does, which I’m sceptical about. That money certainly wont be going to any person whose creative copyright was stolen to train them. It will be completely swallowed by the tech billionaires, who will progress to Gazillionaires and we’ll all be charged to access our own material and any supposed benefit that might accrue.
I also read that $1.5 billion is being invested every day in AI development. Those investors are going to want their money back with interest. AI access is going to be very expensive and will be embedded in everything that we do and purchase.
I recently read an interview with Demis Hassabis. Sir Demis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and a UK Government AI Adviser. He, as an AI developer is totally sucked in by the hype that he is creating. Of course, he is making a motza out of it too – no surprises there. He is claiming that it will be ten times more productive than the industrial revolution and 10 time faster, plus, everyone will be getting rich and having time off etc etc. Isn’t it amazing how these very clever blokes. and let there be no doubt about it, they are ever so bright. How can they be so stupid with a capitol S! Hassabis and Farquhar are talking like simpletons (with a capitol S). None of their claims are likely to come to fruition in the way that they state. I’m not very clever, but I can smell bull s**t a mile off. Many people will be worse off when they loose their jobs.
There is already sufficient wealth in the world for everyone to be well fed, comfortable, safe and with access to effective health care, but as Harari points out, corruption, nepotism and greed mean that 70% of the available wealth is all tied up in pointless and excessive accumulation of useless assets like super yachts, personal jumbos, spare mansions in multiple countries etc. etc. Non-productive, excessive consumption, for no good reason – other than excessive greed and stupidity. (with a capitol S)
Hassabis claims, “we should be in a world of what I sometimes call radical abundance. He paints a picture of medical advances, room-temperature superconductors, nuclear fusion, advances in materials, mathematics. It should lead to incredible productivity and therefore prosperity for society. We should be in an amazing world of abundance for maybe the first time in human history.”
He uses the word ‘should’ a lot. But it won’t turn out like he is suggesting! No good will come of this over-hyping of AI. There will still be a four year waiting list for an operation in NSW, There will still be genocide in Gaza and senseless slaughter in Ukraine. They should know better! They should be talking about all the unemployment that is going to come along with it. How will this prosper society?
I heartily recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Nexus”.
On a brighter note;
In Korea, they have these giant TV screens on the side of major roads used for advertising, just like we have static bill boards here.
I got these images sent to me from 2 different friends a few days apart. I can see that it is me on a giant TV screen on the side of the freeway in Korea. I can’t read it, but I know the image. Its from the TV documentary made about my work in Korea during my recent trip there. I’m assuming that it is an add for the doco?
It’s all about my work researching low emissions technology in wood kiln firings, and introducing it to potters, research institutions and universities, to try and clean up the atmosphere, and make the world a better place. Potters aren’t responsible for very much of the atmospheric pollution in the world on a per capita percentage basis, cleaner cars and industrial processes will make a much bigger impact, but every little bit helps. Potters must play their part. I’m doing my bit – without AI.
The main reason for potters and ceramic institutions being interested in my work, is because there is a substantial local blow-back when people see a kiln chimney belching out black smoke. So they quite rightly ask, why are they still allowed to be so filthy and polluting? Change is coming, albeit slowly. A World-Wide the ban on diesel engined vehicles starts to come in, in some countries in 2035, and by most by 2050.
Once coal burning power stations are all closed down, and these broad, society wide changes are introduced. I predict that it will be impossible for a potter to belch out black smoke and get away with it. There will be legislation to severely limit carbon particulate emissions. Potters need to be engaging with this issue now, so that when the time comes, we can show that we can, if not eliminate, then at least severely limit any PM 2.5’s emitted from our chimneys.
It’s going to be a big challenge, and might not prove to be even possible, but the sooner we start, the sooner we will get to a good workable and hopefully affordable solution. We have about 10 years.
I’m back home from my work in Korea. I managed to drop a firebrick on my foot on the 3rd day. I couldn’t wear a shoe after that, as the big toe had swollen up so much, such that I had to wear a plastic ‘flip-flop’ thong to keep working. I went to the local convenience store in the village and bought alcohol disinfectant spray for cleaning the toe, over-sized bandaids, gauze bandage and medical tape. I was amazed that such a tiny village shop had everything that I needed. The next day, the local government health clinic was open and my friends took me to the clinic to see the doctor. I needed them to translate for me. The doctor told me that I had kept it very clean and to try and keep it elevated, not to walk on it too much and that if it started to throb or get red. I should come back ASAP. As a precaution, he prescribed and also issued me with 2 different antibiotics, for 3 times a day, enough for 10 days. I don’t like to take any antibiotics if I don’t absolutely need to, but I certainly didn’t want to end up with medical complications while in a foreign country, so I took them. I didn’t want to risk getting toe-main poisoning and it spreading up my leg to Knee-monia and possibly even dick-theria.The doctor offered me an X-ray, but I assured him that I could still bend the toe. I had to demonstrate that for him, so that he was satisfied.
My friend got out his credit card to pay, but there was no charge!!!! I’m a foreigner here. I don’t pay taxes here. I should pay for such a terrific service. Korea is an amazing place!
My foot was still swollen, and I was still wearing a plastic flip-flop thong on my foot right up until I left Korea. I even had to attend the official opening of the exhibition in my formal black thong. The nail has since died and come off. I’m so lucky that I have such good friends and that it wasn’t worse. The garden has grown such a lot while I was away, and badly needs a lot of weeding. Apparently there was a lot of rain and the temperature was quite mild. So plenty of late autumn growth. I got stuck into the weeding straight away, just an hour at a time each day. Weeding always involves such a lot of bending. I’m of an age where this is not so comfortable any more. So I space out my efforts, I didn’t want to over do it. The second day, I decided to wear knee pads so that I could get closer to the weeds, to minimise the bending. I also wore light gloves to save my fingers. So I am learning to change my old habits to make living here the way that I have so far, and want to continue to do into the future, a more achievable prospect. This is a really hands-on life style, doing almost everything the old fashioned way, by hand, honouring local gardening lore and organic traditions with green environmental knowhow/theories. A permanent garden/orchard/vegetable patch, including chickens, all inter-woven and based on sustainable living principals, but with a nod to modern conveniences where necessary, like a cultivator and a mower. We can still pick all of our salad lunches and our nightly dinner from the garden each evening, it’s just that the flavours have changed to winter forage now. We have all the usual winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and kohlrabi. We cook a lot of vegetable stir fry, tofu, okonomiyaki, Japanese style cabbage pan cake, baked mixed vegetables, and cauliflower au gratin etc. We have also just celebrated the start of the cold winter season with an old fashioned baked dinner. Our first red meat meal since last winter.
Other than weeding the garden, there is also a lot of mowing, so an hour or so of that each day too. The garden work fills half the day. I’m using the electric ride-on mower for the bigger areas that have become deep in luscious growth. But I also use the electric strimmer for all the edges where the ride on can’t get to. It’s a good feeling to know that all the work is being achieved powered by sunshine these days instead of fossil fuels. Janine fills in the gaps with the electric push mower, to get in under the branches of the fruit trees and other similarly appropriate places for that mower.
We have worked hard at planning and finally becoming a fully solar electric household. We started back in 2007, when the cost of solar panels finally became affordable for us. When I was a teenager, the only solar panels were to be found on space craft and satellites. We’ve come a long way and Australia can be proud of the world famous, ground breaking research into refining solar panel technology done by Professor Green at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We have slowly increased our solar PV over the years, until now we have 17kW of PV panels and two 15 kWh batteries. Sufficient to charge 2 electric cars, run the house and pottery workshop, Fire our electric kilns and if carefully managed, also selling the excess back to the grid. Although we try to minimise our exports, as we only get paid 5 cents per kWh. It’s better to use it all ourselves. We haven’t paid a power bill since 2007, and spend more money on petrol for things like the chain saw and fire fighting pumps than we do on our Plug-In Hybrid car. Now that the garden and grounds are back under control, I’m also back in the pottery, making pots again, for the other half of each day, making again is fun and half of my existence. My start back on the potters wheel was delayed by a day, as the pug mill had seized up from being left for too long without use. I had to hand scrape the clay from the barrel nozzle and take out the vacuum screens to remove hardened clay from the mesh. Quicker and easier than a complete strip down, but still time consuming. It somehow feels like a bit of a waste of time, but any other option is far worse, I’m so grateful to my friends who passed on their old pug mills to me after the fire. You know who you are. Thank You! I’m very grateful to be so lucky to own my very old, re-furbished, Venco pug mills.
The next day I’m back on the wheel throwing perfectly de-aired and beautifully mixed plastic clay. My old wrists are too worn out to hand wedge all my clay any more. I did manage a lot of hand wedging for the first year back at work here, during lock down. I couldn’t buy a new Venco as they were out of production, and the large 100mm. model is still un-available! I don’t know where I get the energy and enthusiasm to keep on working like this into my older years, other friends and colleagues have retired, but I was determined not to let the 3rd bush fire in 50 years and loss of another pottery workshop stop me. I’m still here and still creating the things that I love. So out of desperation and necessity, I hand wedged my clay to my lasting detriment. My ageing wrists have never really recovered. Even throwing slowly on the kick wheel, causes just a little bit of a twinge, so I have to modify my hand position slightly to cope. We have a few Shimpo electric potters wheels, mostly used for our weekend workshops, that run on our solar power, but I really prefer the old ‘Leach’ treadle style kick wheel for all the smaller domestic pots.
Winter brings on the citrus crop, so we start the season by making 2 batches of marmalade, lemon, lemonade and lime marmalade and then tangelo and navel orange marmalade. The Seville oranges aren’t ready yet. They come on later in the season. They make the very best marmalade.
It’s hard to believe, but today, in winter, at the end of the first week of June, I picked a ripe red tomato. We still have self sown tomato plants flowering. We have had ripe tomatoes in June before. It all depends on the severity of the frosts. At this stage we have had a frost during the week, but because the vegetable garden is fully netted to keep out the birds, that netting seems to just take the edge off the frosts, allowing us to still harvest tomatoes so late in the season.
It’s so good to be home again! We have a quotidian flock of wild wood ducks, that have decided to take up residence on the front lawn, sometimes up to 30 or so of them. They seem to like it here. Plenty of grass to eat and 4 dams to explore. Why wouldn’t they? They were probably all born and raised here over the years. They do pooh all over the lawn, so we have to watch where we step and wipe our feet at lot. We have a shoes-off household, so no problem about the house, but a lot of pooh gets tramped into the pottery workshop when we have weekend workshops and open days.
If this is my biggest problem in life. I’m so, so lucky!
Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished, and nothing lasts.
I’m working in Korea in this little artists village community on the edge of a country town. There have been potters here making and mining porcelain stone for 800 years. The village is located away from the township, such that the smoke from the traditional wood fired kilns is not a concern for the township residents. It was great forethought in its time to start to locate all the wood kilns up into this side valley.
But it doesn’t stop there, this has been a long-term plan and as with all long-term plans, it is evolving and adapting with current thinking and social mores. Hence my involvement here with the constriction of my low-emissions wood kiln firing designs and techniques. I was commissioned to start this work here, back in 2019, I was all set to come, but before I could start, we had the fire, then covid intervened. So I was unavailable for some years. But I’m back here again now the the plan is back on track.
My demonstration firing was very successful. In previous firings here the only fuel available to fire the kilns with was very dry 5 year aged local pine. The standard fuel here that everybody uses. It is a statement of fact here that dry pine is the only fuel that works in a kiln!
Last year when I was travelling around, I visited a famous potter’s studio, where they fired with wood. He had built a special pine fuel drying kiln, to desiccate his very thinly split fuel. He told me that it was his special secret, and that only desiccated pine could raise the temperature of the kiln easily. Other potters struggle with ordinary wood, but he had discovered the answer. I decided not to mention that I sometime throw water over the dry pine to get a better result! He had no concerns about making smoke. That was taken as a norm. All kilns make smoke, don’t they!
In the kilns that I have built here, the 5 year seasoned pine burnt furiously and it was very difficult for me to minimise the smoke. I managed it, but wasn’t at all happy with such dry volatile fuel. I enquired about alternatives. There is hard wood available in the form of oak and acacia. But no one uses it for kiln firing as it doesn’t work!!! That was the local opinion anyway! Meaning that it doesn’t work in the traditional kiln designs, used here, using traditional techniques. I thought that it might just be ideal for my purposes, for use in the down draught firebox.
For this most recent firing I had requested that both pine and oak be available, to give me options. There is also the possibility of using local acacia wood, But I was told that this is not considered be be a useful fuel for kilns. That made me more interested in trying it out. I said that it is one of the better fuels back in Australia, but that hasn’t cut any ice here as yet – apparently.
When I arrived, the oak and pine were stacked neatly in front of the kiln. A lovely sight. I started by using just 100% oak. Initially, I found that the oak burnt black and then smouldered. Just as everyone else had found. But I was perfectly sanguine about this, because my local stringy bark timber back in Australia does the same. In fact the locals wouldn’t cut it for use in their open fire places because of this. I quickly found that a blend of 80% oak with 20% pine was a good combination to get started with, using the flashy pine to keep the oak burning. This combo worked well from 700 up to about 1000 oC, when I cut the use of the pine back to just 10%, and finally at 1100oC, I was using straight oak.
This series of combinations got the kiln firing well, while still burning quite cleanly with almost non-existent traces of smoke from the chimney. Just the occasional waft of pale grey smoke.
Problem solved. I was able to fire up to cone 9 in reduction with virtually NO smoke, while firing in reduction. This is a notable achievement here. A lot of chatter and comment, firing in a wood fired kiln with no smoke, by using the oft’ maligned local oak. Applause all round. Who’d have thought?
Maybe the local acacia might even have been better? But that is a project for another visit.
There are two ceramic university campuses that are keen to follow up on this, as they are located in cities, and there is no possibility of being able to make smoke in their location. Downdraught oak firing might just do the trick.
Word gets about it seems. During the cooling period I got news that the opening of the kiln would have to be delayed from one day to the next, then from the morning of the appointed day, to the afternoon, as the Federal Minister of Culture wanted to be there to see the results unpacked, and he could only be available in the afternoon of the 8th. So when in Rome… I delayed the opening at his masters pleasure.
I’m certain that this is no accident. Of course, I don’t know, but it smacks of ‘realpolitik’ strategising. I’d bet that the Director of the Museum has organised this as a media event to promote the Museum. Politicians fund the things that they see, are involved in, understand, AND if it looks like a successful vehicle to advantage their own career. They want to be seen associated with it.
Just a thought! Call me cynical! But…
I remember some years ago. I collected some porcelain stone from here and took them back to Australia and made a large bowl out of them. I glazed the bowl with a subtle blue celadon glaze that I made incorporating kangaroo ash. A kangaroo had died on my property, so I calcined it and retrieved the local source of phosphorous from the bones. Phosphorous is known to enhance the optical blue in certain pale iron glazes like celadon.
I gave it as a gift to the Museum Director along with the story. This was my own private Cultural Exchange project. His Korean stones collected from this historic site, made into a pure sericite clay body glazed with my Australian kangaroo blue glaze. He loved it. He was so taken by it that he called the Premier and made an appointment for us to meet him and make the bowl a gift to him. Thus bringing the Museum into his field of vision.
We turned up just before the appointed time for our 15 mins of fame, and were eventually ushered into the Official Office along with newspaper reporters, translators, aids and other staff. I was duly introduced to the Premier, a little bit of small talk. He had been very well briefed and made appropriate comments. Then it was down to brass tacks. I handed over the bowl and he graciously accepted it on behalf of the Korean People. He said straight away that he knew next to nothing of Ceramics, but understood the significance of the effort that had gone into such an art work and its cultural exchange significance. He thanked me again and shook my hand. There was a flurry of flash bulbs going off to record this staged event.
He asked me how I came to be researching Korean Porcelain from this remote place. I replied that Korean porcelain is unique in the history of world ceramics. I came here because of the history of the place and the pots that were made here. You can only learn so much from books. I had to come to experience it. He smiled, so you knew about Korean porcelain from back in Australia? I said yes, once I learnt about it, I had to come. The Porcelain Museum here is one of the very few places in the world where this kind of study can take place. Mr Jung, The Director, is very supportive, open and inclusive. He runs a great institution.
The Premier was reflective for a second, then said. I believe that you can build pottery kilns that fire with wood and make no smoke. This is important for the environment. Mr Jung has asked me for more funding for this kind of project. If the Museum is so famous internationally, attracting research like yours,
I will fund it!
The next day, the newspapers had the Premier on the front page announcing the success of his funding initiative for his international artistic ceramic exchange program, for the very successful, now internationally recognised, Yanggu Porcelain Museum. Every one wins. The Premier gets all the credit and is in the paper looking like a hero. The Museum Director got his funding. I enjoyed the research and achievement of making the lovely bowl. The premier mentioned before we all left, that the best place to keep such a unique bowl, would be in the porcelain museum.
Back to the present time and hence the sudden flush of offers of work to build similar such kilns from established potters and university campuses. Once it is shown to work, it gets it’s own legs. Word travels fast. These days it travels electronically with likes and re-postings. It’s very fast.
The Minister of Culture is coming for a visit to the Museum and will be at the opening of the kiln. The kiln has cooled more than enough waiting for him to arrive. I’m introduced to the minister, he asks me in Korean – if I can speak Korean. I recognise the phrase, so I’m onto it, but my recall of Korean standard reply phrases is so slow, that before I can make my clumsy reply, he already knows my answer, so swiftly continues in English. “So we will have to speak in English then!”. I nod my thanks.
We make some small talk. He’s been briefed on hisc way here about the nature of the project and asks me if it is going well and I reply yes. That’s the depth of our interaction. That was my 15 seconds of fame! The photographers elbow in and I’m shifted sideways. The minister looks quizzically at the kiln and my Jung explains something in Korean. The Museum team are then given the go-ahead to unpack the kiln.
The firing is unpacked and everyone ‘oohs’ and ‘arrhs’, the other potters here each look in and turn to me with BIG smiles and thumbs-up. Huge sigh of relief. Everyone is all smiles. The pots are mostly well fired, but I’m interested in the minutiae of the detail. I’m looking not just for colour, but for the depth of colour in the celadons. Not just a shiny surface, but a certain quality of soft melt and satiny quality there. I want to get in and see the flame path and the flashing on the exposed surfaces and kiln shelves. Where is the ash deposit and how has it melted. None of this is possible with 50 people crowding around and flash guns going off.
Its a bit like a crime scene or perhaps an archaeological dig. You don’t want a rabble of untrained people trampling all the evidence and the details. Just like an aboriginal tracker, I want to read the ephemera, the subtle traces and shadows, but that isn’t going to happen. The pots are whipped out and shown to the Minister, with total disregard of their place in the kiln and their fire face and lee side qualities.
It’s just a little bit of a shame, as I’d like to learn more than I am able to in this situation. Looks like I’m the only one who isn’t ecstatic! I am really pleased that everyone else is so happy with the result, but I know that I can do better. But I need to read the surfaces to be able to learn what I need to be better at it the next time round.
In a perfect world, I’d like to go slowly and examine each pot in detail. These pots aren’t just trophies and trinkets, they are also part of my research, or at least they were when they went in! But this has become a media event now, and that is also very important, possibly more important, because it may well result in continued or even better funding into the future. A topic far more important than one firing and a few glazed pots.
The firing is a success, no doubts. Everyone is happy. They all leave feeling uplifted and maybe just a little bit happy and warm inside to know that they have been somewhere where there is some sort of mysterious, but positive, environmental action taking place. Even though they don’t understand what it is.
Back at the Museum tomorrow, I’ll have to have a quiet look at all the work as we are setting up the show. But the exact context will be lost, however, I can fill in some of the missing info using my experience. I’m so pleased that everyone is happy, but I could have learnt more to help them with the next firing, as the kiln still needs some fine tuning.
What I could see quite clearly, was that the oak ash was very refractory. I’m guessing that it is very high in SiO2. We may need to burn a bit more pine in the mix to introduce some CaO (calcium flux) into the eutectic to get a softer surface from the ash deposit. I was burning 20% pine in the early stages without smoke. I might have to keep that up for the whole firing? As pine ash has a lot of calcium in it.
All grist for the mill in the future. I could also see that the floor at the back was still a little bit under-fired, so I was up at 5,30 this morning and went down to the kiln and took out the bag wall and rebuilt it one layer lower and with one full brick removed, to make larger gaps. I will see how this works after the next firing. I also placed one brick in the middle flue hole to force the flame out to the corners more. All little fine adjustments that I hope will make it fire more evenly.
Another option for the refractory silicious ash problem might be to place a few tiny pre-fired stoneware cups containing a spoon full of Na2CO3 (washing soda) in the front of the kiln. This will mimic a few years of charcoal built-up and decomposition at high temperatures, where sodium vapours are released from the burning embers. The soda will sublimate and slowly volatilise throughout the firing, reacting with the silicious ash as it is being laid down and help it to melt. or I hope so anyway. Everything is an experiment!
I could also use common salt to get a similar effect, but sodium chloride creates a slightly different look. I don’t want to change the look of the ceramic surface from wood fired into salt glaze pots. But anything and everything is worth a try. At least once. I first came across this light salting technique being used in La Bourne in France, back in 1974, where they had been doing it for centuries. As a naive student, I thought that it was a very clever idea that I hadn’t come across before. Many potters have used it since. In fact, it has become part of the standard repertoire.
With the influence of the Minister of Culture on the front pages and the release of the TV doco soon, there will almost certainly be more enquiries about this firing method. It is my intension to try and leave the kilns here in good condition and with useful, technically accurate kiln firing logs that the students here can use to do their own firings in the future. Hopefully we can work together ‘virtually’ via ‘Kakao’ talk or Zoom to achieve the best result possible. It could be a whole lot easier if they would just read the book, or at least the first chapter on how to fire!
All that is required now is for some young enterprising Korean potter to pick it up and run with it, develop a small business building these kilns for whoever wants one.
Maybe firing a downdraught fire box kiln with local oak will become a thing? I have shown that it is possible. It is now one other possible strategy for potters and academics in the field, to follow to be able to keep on wood firing here into a cleaner, carbon constrained, and environmentally friendlier future.
All I need to do now is to introduce them to the concept of the after-burner/scrubber to minimise PM 2.5 particulates, not just smoke. But that is a bridge too far at this time and for this visit.
Apparently numbers are beautiful, and can be fun!We had a visit from one of my very earliest students, who I hadn’t seen since graduation almost 50 years ago.
She had trained in maths at uni, but ended up teaching maths at school. This didn’t seem to be sufficiently rewarding to her, so she came into the Art School to train as a potter, teaching maths part-time to support herself during this 2nd lifestyle choice of vocation as a mature age student.
We had an interesting catch-up and she explained to me that numbers have a personality and are beautiful. She told me that she could look at a number and know a lot about it from its ‘character’, or something akin to its ‘personality’?
Numbers are like people, you can learn a lot about them just by the way that they look.
I’m not a maths person myself. However during our conversation, I started to understand a little bit more about the look of numbers and learnt that I do have some little bit of insight into numbers. When I was at school, we had to learn maths by rote. I never felt the desire to enquire further. So unlike my experience of learning about ceramics, which I couldn’t stop thinking about, pondering, romancing etc. in my spare moments.
These days, I usually only use numbers to defend myself. ie. to add up the bill and check it for accuracy. But I sometimes use my limited maths to understand the chemistry of clays and glazes, ie. Brongniarts formula, Segar formula, and electric kiln wiring calculus to build heating element systems. They are not ‘fun’ jobs, this is strictly work. So some of that rote learning does get regurgitated and applied to real-life practical questions. I’m pleased that I am able to put my mind to it successfully. So numbers are useful, but I don’t romance them.
However, I was amazed to find that although I know next to nothing about maths and have little interest in it, I do know something about the look of numbers. When I say, the look of numbers, what I’m referring to is the insight that you gain through familiarity, like the look of words. I may not know how to spell some words, but when I write them down, I can tell that they look either wrong or right. So I recognise that I do know more than I realise.
Here are some of the numbers that first came to mind, and that I realised that I knew the look of pretty well;
0, (zero) having read the book ’The nothing that is!’. I learnt that as a species we learnt to count to to describe and tally the things that we owned. Goats, for example. If I only own one goat, then I pretty well always know where it is. but if I was and early human learning to convert from hunter gathering to residual farming and herding, then I would need to be able to know exactly how many goats I had, where they were, and if one was missing, so counting became a useful and necessary asset.
It’s not a long stretch of the imagination to think about the farmer who owned no goats, didn’t need to count, so it took a very long time for the concept of ‘0’ zero to come into existence. No one really ever needed to specifically count the fact that they didn’t have anything. Who would believe that someone could write an interesting book about nothing!
Well, Robert Kaplan, that’s who! “The nothing that is- a natural History of Zero”.
3, my favourite number. Because there is something odd about it.
21, how old my truck is
61, the route that Bob Dylan metaphorically revisited.
66, the highway that black Americans used to escape, persecution, rape and lynchings, and sang about in the early blues.
666, the number of the beast!
667, the neighbour of the beast!
2000, the cost of registering, green slipping, insuring, and putting 2 new tyres on my old truck to get it through rego inspection today. I own it outright, but this is the cost of renting it back from the institutions that allow me to drive it on the roads.
I’m reading a book at the moment, all about probability! It’s a really interesting read. I’m enjoying it and even though its a very thick book, about 2” or 50mm thick. I’m racing through it, but I’m not sure that I’ll finish it. A week ago I would have said with certainty that I would have finished it quickly, but having read most of it now, I’m rather reluctant to make such a bold claim. I’m uncertain. The first thing I learnt from reading this book was that probability probably doesn’t exist!
‘The Art of Uncertainty’ is written by Sir David Spieglehalter FRS OBE, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University. Someone to take seriously indeed. The sub-title of the book is ‘How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance Risk and Luck’. I was lucky enough to navigate across it by chance and took the risk to disabuse my self of some of my ignorance.
I’ve never been a person blessed with a sense of certainty, I’m probably more of the perplexed personality type – if there is such a one? So I have really enjoyed reading Prof Spieglehalter’s explanation of chance, ignorance risk and luck. There is so much to it. After explaining each topic, he gives an example from real life, then reduces every example to a mathematical model basis, which is also really fascinating. I’ve never been that interested in maths, but Prof Spieglehalter explains it so well, I could follow most of it.
“Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does)
Life is uncertain. None of us know what is going to happen. We know little of what has happened in the past, or is happening now outside our immediate experience. Uncertainty has been called the ‘conscious awareness of ignorance — be it of the weather tomorrow, the next Premier League champions, the climate in 2100 or the identity of our ancient ancestors.
In daily life, we generally express uncertainty in words, saying an event “could”, “might” or “is likely to” happen (or have happened). But uncertain words can be treacherous.
Attempts to put numbers on chance and uncertainty take us into the mathematical realm of probability, which today is used confidently in any number of fields. Open any science journal, for example, and you’ll find papers liberally sprinkled with P values, confidence intervals and possibly Bayesian posterior distributions, all of which are dependent on probability.
And yet, any numerical probability, I will argue — whether in a scientific paper, as part of weather forecasts, predicting the outcome of a sports competition or quantifying a health risk — is not an objective property of the world, but a construction based on personal or collective judgements and (often doubtful) assumptions. Furthermore, in most circumstances, it is not even estimating some underlying ‘true’ quantity. Probability, indeed, can only rarely be said to ‘exist’ at all. All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.”
Life is uncertain. All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others!
As probability probably doesn’t exist. I’m probably not too sure what the last chapter will tell me. If I finish the book!
We probably really don’t know much at all. Get used to it.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing last forever.
We have had our Hyundai ‘Ioniq’, plug-in electric hybrid car for 6 years now and it has all been a good experience, even better actually, A great experience!
This car has exceeded our expectations. We have settled into a routine with it now. We can drive anywhere locally on the battery, doing our local shopping and social visits very comfortably. If we need to go further afield, no problem, the petrol engine will bring us home.
We always charge at home from our solar PV panels. We have never been to a charging station. We have taken it on longer trips up the Queensland twice and down to Canberra several times. For these trips, we rely on the petrol engine. However, these trips are seldom done and are the exception.
For those interested in facts and figures. My log book tells me that by January 2025, we had traveled 64,000kms and spent a total of $1,860 on fuel. That’s about 34 kms to the dollar, or if petrol is $1.80 per litre, then we are getting about 61 kms to the litre. NOT 6 but 61! Most of that fuel was purchased on those long trips.
We are in the habit of putting $20 to $30 dollars worth of fuel in the car about 4 times a year. When we first purchased it. I filled the tank on the way home, as per normal practice with a new car. Big mistake! It took us almost a year to use up that fuel. It was sitting there going stale in the tank for most of the time. Stale fuel can be a big problem, so we have not done that since, unless we are planning a long trip.
When fully fueled up with a full battery and a full tank. The fuel/trip computer tells me that we can go 1,150 kms!
The Ioniq, is a medium sized car, but is the biggest car that we have ever owned. It’s vast and comfortable compared to the little 3 cylinder Japanese 900 CC Daihatsu, Charade and Sirion, cars that we have had previously. These were very fuel efficient, very tiny, very nippy and could find a tiny parking space anywhere. I like the driving feel of the small cars, but I love driving the Hyundai. It’s so smooth, quiet and comfortable.
We have had no issues with it. Although, maybe just one, when rats are some part of the electrical wiring system. It cost us $600 to find the fault and get it repaired. Not too bad in the scheme of things, as the mechanic told us that several cars that he had looked at and quoted on recently were written off because of the cost of repair from rats eating the wiring loom. We were lucky!
Since then, I have begun opening the bonnet as soon as we get home, and fitting a bright LED light in the engine compartment, fitted with a 24 hour timer, so that is switches on at dusk and off at dawn, all automatically. That makes the engine compartment an unpleasant place to be for a rat. It also allows engine heat to dissipate readily, making it even less hospitable.
I love my plug-in electric car, so much so, that in December I bought a new fully electric Fiat 500e ‘bambino’. That classic little Italian car from the movies. First produced post-war, in the 50’s, and has been in production right through until today. In various models. This brand new electric version is incredibly cute. It can go 300kms on a full charge, which is enough to drive to Sydney and back.
I installed a new 3 phase, 40 amp, charger for it, It just plugs into the already existing 3 phase power socket on the wall in the carport. So I can charge it at home on sunshine. It takes from 3 to 4 hours from empty to fully charge. We can do this overnight from our home ‘powerwall’ batteries, using yesterdays sunshine, or during the day directly from the sun. However, I usually top it up any time there is plenty of sun that we are not getting very much money for when we sell to the grid.
The Fiat only seats 2 realistically, although it has a back seat and 4 seat belts, the back seat is only for child sized passengers. I’ve put the back seats down to double the boot space. So now it’s a two door, two seater hatch.
Its incredibly powerful. The torque is amazing, and can pin you back in your seat. But this is normal for all electric cars. They have loads of torque! It’s the classic small, nippy car that I have always loved to drive, but now I drive on sunshine!
So now, after a couple of months of ownership, I can say that it is fantastic, and does everything that we need to do. However, if I had to do a thousand kilometre drive to Melbourne or Queensland for some reason, I’d take the Hyundai for the long haul comfort and leg room.
We are very pleased to be a fully solar powered household. We can run the House, Pottery, Kilns and 2 cars on our solar. I even got a $350 cheque from the electricity company last week, for all our unused excess. This will reduce in Winter, but so far, we have never paid an electricity bill since 2006/7, when we installed the first solar PV panels.
Even when the fire burnt down our pottery in 2019. With our first PV installation gone, we were without solar for 3 quarters of billing periods. However, we had such a good unclaimed credit on our bill at the time, that we were able to go that whole time just using up our credit. We had new solar panels installed before the end of the year, and we were back on deck before the credit ran out.
Back in 2019, just before the fire destroyed my life. I was commissioned by the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney to create new ceramic work for their collection.
A patron named Mr Willoughby, left his estate to the PowerHouse Museum with instructions that It be used to commission new ceramic and glass works of art for their collection. I was lucky enough to be one of the 6 artists selected to make those works.
I received the commission just before the fire. so I rang the Museum and a offered to return the commission, as I knew that it would take my a long time to re-build my workshop and life, before I could even consider making special new work.
I was a mess after the trauma of fighting the fire, loosing the battle, and running for my life, with my hair on fire, to climb into my kiln and hide in there while the inferno passed over me. That kiln saved my life, but left me shattered. I had no time to de-breif, I started the clean-up operation straight away the next day, and it has never stopped to this day. We are still finishing off the new buildings to make them long term sustainable.
I suffered a lot of Post Traumatic Shock (PTSD) that lasted 4 years, until I could get the correct psychiatric help – EMDR – trauma therapy. I decided to make some new pieces for the Museum collection, that responded to my situation, some 3 years late!
This is downloaded from my artists statement on the Museum’s web site;
Full Artist Statement ‘Self Portrait’ by Steve Harrison
‘I’ve finally completed the commission for the Powerhouse Collection. I was chosen as 1 of the 6 artists to make new work for the collection, as part of the ‘Willoughby Commission’, way back in 2019, just a few weeks before my workshop and studio were destroyed in the 2019 catastrophic bush fires. It has taken me over 3 years to get back on my feet with a functioning creative workspace. I have spent the last 12 months since then assembling this new work. My original thought was to make beautiful porcelain bowls that encapsulated my love of a quiet, gentle and sustainable approach to life and making. But all that was dashed in the fires, when all my lifetime collection of ceramic materials, kilns and buildings were destroyed in just one day. I stayed to defend and save my house but suffered considerable trauma in the process. I have created this new work for the collection to reflect the chaos and destruction that I endured. I decided to work with the many hundreds of shattered pieces of broken pottery that littered the site after the fire. A few pieces were broken but had the potential to be repaired using the ancient Japanese technique of kintsugi – gold repair. These few small bowls, although damaged, had the potential to be recovered with patient attention to detail. Kintsugi expresses a desire to ‘honour’ a damaged, but still lovely object by giving it time to be rebuilt, and eventually to possibly become even more beautiful than before, because of the time and effort spent on it. I spent some months, part-time, cleaning, repairing and re-constructing missing parts of these bowls to make them ‘complete’ again. They are whole again, although different from before. Damaged and altered, changed from what they were, but in some ways ‘enhanced’ and given a lot of love and care, they are somehow more beautiful, but in a completely different way. They became symbols of my journey to recovery. This work of slow repair and enhancement gave me to idea to create new pieces that didn’t previously exist but created from the mixed shards sieved from the ashes of the ruins. Completely new work, but made from a composite of all my old work. It’s been a very slow and tedious job of work, assembling a thousand small, burnt, broken and shattered shards all back together in a new combination to make ‘compendium’ pieces of my life’s work. Each shard needs to be held in place until the glue sets, so only a few shards can be added each day. I’m calling them ‘abstracts’, not because they have any relationship to modern painting, but because an ‘abstract’ is the first part of an academic thesis, which summarises the contents of the entire paper. In this case, these newly constructed vessels comprise many small shards of my work made at different times over my career, mostly sifted from the ashes of the old pottery after the fire, but also containing a few new post fire pieces as well. In this sense they are a summary of my life’s work, presented in a new form. An auto biography, or a ‘self-portrait’ in ceramics perhaps? They contain a small part of every phase of my career from my earliest days here, through to the present. Just as I have rebuilt my shattered and damaged self through a lot of trauma therapy since the fire, I am mostly better, but still carry a bit of lingering damage with me. I’m repaired and reconstructed, but different.
Screenshot
‘Self Portrait 1’ by Steve Harrison
OBJECT NO. 2024/78/1
Harrison has lived and worked in Balmoral Village near Mittagong, in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, for almost 5 decades, pursuing a simple life of self-sufficiency and commitment to his local community. His interest in single-stone hard paste porcelain led to extensive travels and research of porcelain clays and processes in Japan, China, Korea and Britian, building bonds of fellowship with the international potter community. He has intensely explored the regional geology of Mittagong and Joadja Valley, focussing on sericite, and mica-based stones, to create his own clays, glazes and then bowls and jars fired with locally sourced wood or solar-powered electricity. While the forms of the simple vessels he has made over the years have changed, they have all been testaments to his life-long quest for the essence of porcelain clay and delight in the ‘subdued beauty’ of natural materials. Harrison’s vessels have seen many exhibitions at galleries such as the Kim Bonython, Legge and Watters galleries in Sydney and his works are in major Australian galleries and museums. Harrison has often augmented his works of clay with words crafted to express the relationships between the pieces, his life, the history of ceramic art, the state of the world and its fragile environment. ‘Self Portrait 1’ and ‘Self Portrait 2’ were commissioned just before the most severe bush fires of 2019 destroyed his pottery in December that year. A particularly ferocious fire almost claimed Harrison’s life, as it climbed over a thin skin of a makeshift kiln-like shelter assembled a day earlier, a last minute ‘plan B’. These works are entirely unique in Harrison’s creative output, in their concept, circumstances of production and the large scale of ‘Self Portrait 1’. Assembled from surviving fragments and shards of diverse vessels he made during his life as a potter, in Harrison’s own words, they are an ‘abstract’ or ‘compendium’ of his life’s work: ‘This work was commissioned just a few weeks before my workshop and studio were destroyed in the 2019 catastrophic bush fires. It has taken me over 3 years to get back on my feet with a functioning creative workspace. I have spent the last 12 months assembling this new work. My original thought was to make beautiful porcelain bowls that encapsulated my love of a quiet, gentle, and sustainable approach to life and making. But all that was dashed in the fires, when all my lifetime collection of ceramic materials, kilns and buildings were destroyed in just one day. I stayed to defend and saved my house but suffered considerable trauma in the process. I have created this new work to reflect the chaos and destruction that I endured. I worked with the many hundreds of shattered pieces of broken pottery that littered the site after the fire…to make ‘compendium’ pieces of my life’s work… an auto biography, or a ‘self-portrait’ in ceramics…Just as I have rebuilt my shattered and damaged self through a lot of trauma therapy since the fire, I am mostly better, but still carry a bit of lingering damage with me. I’m repaired and reconstructed, but different.’ [1] Born of a natural disaster that has changed Harrison’s life irrevocably, the three jars and five bowls in the two complementary installations are extraordinary assertions of the truth Harrison saw in Bernard Leach’s belief that pottery and its traditions are a part of our cross-cultural inheritance, an expression of the hidden potential in our clays and rocks, and an essential avenue to a unity of life and beauty. Within this context, ‘Self Portrait 1’ and ‘Self Portrait 2’ offer the story of Steve Harrison’s remarkable life positioned between a self-professed idyl of a ‘modern peasant’ and destruction, between beauty and ugliness; together they stand as a powerful poem written in clay about his, and our, place in the world, and ultimately, his hymn to survival.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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