The seeds for Confluence were sown on the opening night of the Here and Now 14 exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery when Chris Malcolm, director of the John Curtin Gallery, approached Pippin Drysdale and me with a vision of showcasing both our ceramic practices in the John Curtin Gallery. He envisaged two solo exhibitions that would explore our collaborative process as well as the contrasting influence the Western Australian landscape had instilled in our ceramic journeys.
The John Curtin show was initially scheduled for 2017, but put back to 2018 due to the scale and quantity of work that both Pippin and I intended to create for the John Curtin space.
The body of work that Pippin was imagining was based around the development of her marble forms that I had been experimenting with for a couple of years. The idea was to create a landscape of these forms, painted with metallic lustre and rich coloured surfaces, that would flow along curved plinths.
As this was a new body of work, and I was still experimenting with different techniques to achieve the irregular asymmetric forms, it took a significant amount of time to figure out the best way to create this body of work. Pippin also had to brush up on the painting technique used on the forms as she had not worked with lustre for many years, so it was quite a creative journey, both technically and aesthetically. I worked with Pippin throughout 2017 to achieve the body of work she exhibited in the Confluence exhibition.
The inspiration for my direction was to explore the forms and techniques that I had developed to create the Here and Now 14 works, but to work at a larger scale and to reference the landscape of my surrounds in Yanchep. To realise this, I needed to find space that had large kilns and suitable resources for handling physically large and heavy works.
I had been fascinated with industrial ceramic manufacture from my early days as a student at Perth Technical College. It was during my student days that I ventured into some of the redundant industrial ceramic factories that were being redeveloped in the Perth region at the time. My goal was to recycle the refractories from the furnaces and kilns that were being pulled down in these facilities and use them for building wood-fired kilns for my own work.
I became fascinated with the scale of these factories and the equipment that was left behind before the bulldozers moved in to push them over. I remember the terracotta pipe factory on the Swan River at Ascot and the amazing beehive kilns that fired these pipes with a salt glazed finish. The kilns were incredible structures and the glaze that had built up on the internal hot face bricks was a beautiful warm honey colour with lots of random dark coloured texture from the wood ash, coal and oil that had been used to fire them over the many years they had been in operation.
The fascination I had with these industrial ceramic manufacturing spaces was the catalyst for imagining the possibilities of creating large ceramic vessels, but it was not until the invitation to create a body of work for the John Curtin Gallery that I was able to really explore this concept.
Towards the end of 2017 I approached BGC Brikmakers in South Guildford (now known as Midland Brick) with a proposal to make large scale thrown work using the raw materials and kilns employed to make their range of clay bricks and exhibit my work at the John Curtin Gallery in 2018.
I met with Brikmakers General Manager: Vince Scarvaci, Operations Manager: Bill Swerlowycz and Marketing Manager: Claire Perks in the Brikmakers Boardroom and outlined my vision of creating ceramic artworks using industrial ceramic manufacturing processes. It was received with enthusiasm, and a little bit of scepticism by Vince and Bill as to the possibility of creating large ceramic forms using the materials and kilns at Brikmakers, but an agreement was made for a one-year residency – and I could start the next day! This really was a pivotal moment in my career. I was ‘over the moon’ at the prospect of realising an aspiration that originated in my student days at Perth Technical College.
I began working at Brikmakers in December 2017 after an induction course into the safety systems at the factory which pretty much allowed me access to all areas of the plant. It was during this time that I was introduced to Ryan Jensen, who was the engineer in charge of the kilns, and Nathan Blackwell who was the geologist and Raw Materials Manager. Both Ryan and Nathan were awesome to work with and assisted me greatly with resolving the technical issues that arose during the creation of the large thrown works that I made during my residency.
Developing a new body of work with new materials and processes is always a challenge and I was also pushing the scale of my work which proved to be an added obstacle that I needed to overcome. I learnt a lot about clay and kilns during my time at Brikmakers as well as learning about myself and my desire to succeed with the ambitious project that I had set myself.
During 2018 I was able to create around 14 large thrown works, of which 12 were showcased at the John Curtin Gallery in the exhibition with Pippin that Chris Malcom titled ‘Confluence’. Matthew Bettinaglio, whom I met in 2017 whilst surfing at one of the local Yanchep surf spots, created a series of seven short films that documented the influence of my coastal inspiration and the processes used to create the works at Brikmakers. These films were also shown as part of the Confluence exhibition along with a soundscape created by musician Ryan Burge. Ryan recorded the sounds of the ocean at Yanchep along with the sounds of machinery operating at the Brikmakers factory and wove them into an audio track that was used to create a backdrop for my
vessels in the Confluence show.
It really was an amazing body of work that showcased two very different approaches to referencing the Western Australian landscape through handmade ceramic forms. It was a time of real growth in my ceramic and artistic practise and when I look back at the images of these two bodies of work in the John Curtin Gallery, it still impresses me to see these vessels in such an amazing space.
I will always be grateful to Brikmakers and the John Curtin Gallery for their assistance in making ‘Confluence’ a truly remarkable and memorable experience.
The Portfolio / Exhibition Page offers an overview of the Confluence 2018 exhibition, presenting insights and highlights from a third-person perspective. It also features links to reviews and additional resources for further exploration.
