The JamFactory

Tegan Empsom's beautiful glass Robots and Rabbits. Tegan began her career in the arts with a design associateship within the glass studio at JamFactory Craft and Design Centre.


Based in Adelaide the fantastic JamFactory includes four studios (ceramic, furniture, metal and glass) that regularly host visiting national and international artists, a wonderful gallery showcasing exhibitions of contemporary craft, and a retail spaces. Here are some amazing facts about the Jam Factory....
Pourers by Karen Cunningham a Jam Factory alumni.

JamFactory is Australia's leading studio-based craft development organisation.
Don Dunstan's vision for a craft organisation has been growing successfully for more than thirty three years.

Through sales, JamFactory provides income for over 400 artists and practitioners.
From sales in excess of one and a half million dollars, JamFactory returns over $750,000 to artists. Over the years, those returns have added many millions of dollars to the local creative economy.

JamFactory has employed and trained more than 360 of Australia's leading makers, artists and designers.
JamFactory Alumni are spread throughout the world - many are at the top of their profession.

JamFactory's audience continues to grow.
In 2006 over 125,000 people visited our shops and 75,000 people visited our galleries.

JamFactory is an energetic exhibitor of creative talent.
Last year JamFactory displayed 23 exhibitions demonstrating the works of 104 craft practitioners.
(from the JamFactory website)
Glass jewellery from JamFactory alumni Peta Kruger.

The JamFactory has a great blog and the links to alumni and JamFactory associates will provide many hours of happy web browsing. I am thrilled to be making a body of work to be exhibited down there later this year.

Peel Island- Park Rangers Rock!

On our recent trip to Stradbroke Island we met Rebecca's good friend Rowley Dowling the Park Ranger who took us across to the deserted Peel Island in the middle of Moreton Bay. Peel Island used to be a leper colony and due the to the care and hard work of the Rangers the compound comprising of the hall, official residences and the leper huts is still standing. We drove along a rutted track through wild looking cypress and gum forest. It was very dry and the trees had dead branches ripped off by storms or drought hanging from the the canopy, many trees were covered in veils of dusty green "Old Man's Beard"
Suddenly the forest opened out into the lazaret, a mown, green lawn dotted with little wooden huts.Two of the leper's huts. The Rangers have repaired some of them and left others in various stages to show the history of the site.

This is one of the official residences where we stayed the night.

The best thing that we did on Peel Island was go for a real bushwalk. Rowley took us right into the wallum. It was hot. The wallum is extremely dense vegetation and we had to push our way through scratchy, prickly branches and grasses with sharp razor like points (I've learnt my lesson about wearing shorts when bushwalking!) To get back to the road we walked through head height ferns n a dry peat swamp, every so often our feet would plunge to through the dry crust to the knee and as you grabbed a paperbark stump to get your balance that too, would just come away in your hand. I loved it! When I was a kid we used to go "exploring" all the time time, my mother was surprisingly blase about this and would just call "Take the dogs in case of snakes!"
Artistically it was great to really get in amongst the wallum vegetation. Your eyes, nose and all the senses are taking in information and filing it away for later. We took heaps of photos but they really couldn't convey the excessive heat, prickly scratchy, fecund vegetation, the colours of the leaf litter, the cicadas shrilling, the smell of the dust as a dry papery stump crumbled in your hand.

Ingenuity.......Australian craft in and out of the studio

There are many potters who have an ingenious do-it -yourself streak. They work in studios they have cobbled together out of a few bent nails and some wood salvaged from the local tip, they make their own machinery from washing machine engines they found by the side of the road and brew their own evil beer from secret forest ingredients. I am not one of those potters.

But I admire ingenuity and building skills. I love getting glimpses into other people's work places to see the solutions they have come up with and the more whimsical the materials they use the more delightful and funny it is. This reminds me a show that these sort of potters would love. The Bush Mechanics followed the exploits of a group of aboriginal guys from the Warlpiri tribe as they made their way around the Outback in a series of old bombs. As the cars slowly disintegrated these guys would replace parts with anything they could scavenge- I remember one episode when the wheels fell off and were replaced by bits of wood acting more or less as skis attached to the rear axle!



The flip side to the Ingenious Potter of course is the Smug Luddite Potter who stands up at conferences and speaks in an insufferably superior tone about the intellectual and artistic moral turpitude of potters who "buy clay in bags". You might also hear this boring type raving on about how the "public" is woefully ignorant of ceramic technique and needs to be "educated" so they can see the immense cultural and spiritual value of the Smug Potter's own work!