Issac Button can throw a ton of clay into pots a day!

Students of ceramics and the austere beauty of hard work will love this film. Made in the 1960's it features English potter Issac Button, a man who makes herculean tasks appear effortless. I like the way he smokes a pipe while throwing, I like his simple robust pots. Issac Button claimed that he "never left a pub the same day I entered it!"
As a country potter myself I admire the plain way he goes about his daily work. We are very lucky to have a visual record of something at once so amazing and so ordinary.
Thanks to David Neale for putting the film up on his blog.

Basquiat, Rene Ricard, squeezing inspiration

"As much as undervaluation can kill, so can a false sense of the value of your work. Jean-Michel was advised to stop giving it away. But if your friends can't have it, why live? Overprotection is deadly; the stuff has to get out there to be seen. Making money is something between artists and their stomachs. To turn one's work into fetish that is almost indistinct from oneself, to overpersonalize and covet one's own work, is professional suicide. Fear of rip-off is paralysis. One is always ripped off. Keeping work a secret is the psychology of the applied artist, not the fine artist who must live in a dialogue. "

Poet Rene Ricard writing in his 1981 essay "the Radiant Child" that bought Jean Michel Basquiat to the attention of the wider art world and the New York art-collecting glitterati. This beautiful essay seems almost elegaic even though Ricard is writing about the new work from burning, incandescent artists rising from the world of graffiti, punk music and the streets of New York. He captures the longing, inspiration and intertwined practical, monetary concerns of being an artist and gives them all the finger, in disgust or delight. His sarcastic, sad, beautiful words are worth a read and a re-read.

Studio

The studio is FULL of work. I've got pieces going out all over the place soon. Including the Noosa Travelling Scholarship. Awarded annually, the Scholarship provides funds up to $10,000, $2,500 and $1,000 for the purpose of undertaking travel and study that will support career development. The finalist exhibition will be held at the Noosa Regional Gallery from 27 July - 11 September 2011.Leave on jet plane to Sydney now! Whoooooo hooooooooo!

One Day Winter Workshops in My Studio!

Winter Workshops

The leaves are falling fast, and now is the time to come to Maleny and enjoy the blue, blue sky and crisp mornings. Finally, after many years of requests I'm holding workshops at my Maleny studio! With only only 5 participants per workshop this will be an intimate, hands on exploration of decorative surface techniques. The workshops will begin with an introduction to the beautiful, translucent porcelain and then we'll plunge straight into creating. We will discuss design, pattern, surface texture and imagery in order for you to create two porcelain bowls with your own design. What we are aiming for is a reflection of your own unique personality with all it’s complexity, in your final design! But the day can't be all about work and there will be plenty of demonstrations and a delicious, vegetarian lunch.

I'm running the workshops from 9.30 until 3 so they are convenient for those with school children.

Work will be fired and available to pick up or be sent to your home.

So, bring a friend and come along for a lovely day in the country and enjoy the creative chaos of the studio while making your very own translucent porcelain bowls.

Shannon Garson Porcelain - Winter Workshops
Tuesday June 21st

Tuesday June 28th

Tuesday July 5th

My Studio
9.30-3.00
$130 per person
See details on my website

The Potter's Task

fresh turnings on my studio floor

It is a perennial problem for artists of all descriptions that not enough people buy original , handmade work. I've heard many, many discussions about this over the years . Potters take a range of views from "The public just don't "get" handmade pots and that is why I'm not selling more. " which could be best described as sour grapes, through to "Maybe ceramics are just not fashionable enough for people to buy and the industry is dead." Neither of these opinions encompasses the complexity of the world we live in and how artists fit into our communities.


Design blogs and magazines are aspirational, most people do not live in tidy houses where gleaming objects lie in tasteful arrangements on vintage Swedish sideboards. The relationship of humans to objects is complex and encompasses personal history, emotions, memory, habits, practical needs, evolving relationships as well as aesthetics. It is rare to find a home where all the objects are chosen to match each other for purely aesthetic reasons. The contemporary ceramicists greatest challenge is to find a place within a life, to become an integral part of the complexity and rich texture of a home. This involves building relationships. Not just personal relationships with those who want to buy and collect your work but also making work that hooks into a person's sub-conscious. Intelligent intriguing objects that the collector longs to see, objects that comfort and provoke emotion.

decorating a " Mapping" bowl

The fact is that being a potter is a low-paid profession, you don't hear many people in other traditionally low paid professions expressing surprise at the fact that they will never become wealthy while working as a waitress or a gardener. Some potters earn a decent amount of money but the pay-off for being a potter is not financial. I am as vulnerable as anyone to discontented envy when perusing design magazines and seeing all kinds of work BUT NO HANDMADE POTS featured in their glossy pages, but my job is to make objects and connect with friends and strangers through these things. The connection is a haptic language* quiet and almost unheard in the babble of fashion and mass-produced objects that fill the world. Starting from my local community and working in wider and wider ripples through friends of friends, strangers on the Internet, talking about my work and showing it to people who might never see it, and making, and making and making. The tiring, inspiring never-ending push and pull of responding and eliciting response with words and pots is the potter's task. If work is not selling then you haven't either found the people who are able to hear you or, through arrogance and fear you and your pots are not even in the conversation.

Judith Rofe, a great supporter and communicator in the world of ceramics recently made the point that:

"People looking for an aesthetically pleasing object for their sideboard - one that they will purchase from the heart and possibly pay more for than they meant to - may not have the opportunity to see Australian pottery in the places they go to. Outlets are few and far between, exhibitions ephemeral, potters with open doors not necessarily well advertised or signposted."

A potter's task is to signpost and advertise the aesthetic, emotional and practical value of handmade pots. It is a conversation which involves the sometimes boring, sometimes painful but always useful act of listening to others opinions and needs and responding to that with a new pot or a solution, or an discussion.

* "Haptic" refers to sense of touch. It is a very useful word for potters but really quite academic and I've often found it a bit scary. Good word to pull out at your next Scrabble game though!

Saturday Afternoon

Saturday afternoon. The setting sun and closing of the day has always been an inspiring time for me. Since the "Time of the Children" began the closing of the day is a signal to frantically finish up what ever I'm working on and rush up the stairs to the dinner/shower bedtime tsunami, finishing at around 7.00 by collapsing on the couch. But today we have Holly Throsby playing really loud and the table has a pot of freshly made tea steaming on it and my camera is handy and somehow the elegiac ordinary, setting of the sun through the western windows washes the room with golden light and beauty descends.

And we all have a cup of tea and play our music REALLY LOUD. And I stop wishing I lived in a groovy house that looks like something off "The Selby" blog and that Trev and I hung around the house looking like Potter/cheesemaker/ex-models in our nouveau boho clothing somehow incorporating something in the vague form of a vest that looks like it was made out of a flokati rug.

And I think of an idea to celebrate my normal, wonderful life and the normal wonderful lives of the unstyled cups and plates that we use everyday. Every so often I am going to post images of pots in their natural environment. Chipped, cracked,being sipped at by grubs who insist on drinking out of their teaspoons and spilling milk all over the table. This is how art and life connect.

I've always said there is no use in a having a teapot that is only for looking at.

What's happening in the studio?

Having days off from the studio has an aftershock that occurs about 6 weeks after the original event. Friends or colleauges or collectors"just dropping in" during the work day, is something that artists who work from home literally pay for later in the year.

When I first started my studio practice it was very difficult to get into the studio and start work everyday without fail. The establishment of this routine is absolutely essential to the growth of skills, creative processes and bank balance! I used my favourite radio show, starting at 9 o'clock in the morning to get me down there. But the creative routine is fragile and easily thrown off balance by the robust demands of domesticity and family life.

Creating uninterrupted space within the family week to make pots and toss over new ideas takes nerves of steel as you stare down the homemaker guilt, school mother guilt and the plain old wish to be around your fabulous children and make sure they have moral and intellectual grounding in life, fresh vegetables and do not develop tendencies which are linked to becoming dysfunctional adults in any way. (Like I'd know.......I thought being a professional artist was the only job I could possibly live with!)
Having children has enhanced my work as an artist. It has opened up new emotional territory and trained me to work faster and harder and concentrate in different ways. It is a stark contrast to the luxurious, long, loops of time I spent thinking and making things when I was younger and I'm still in the frantic early years of motherhood (my daughters are 4 and 6) but I am interested to see what kind of artist will emerge from this tempering. I feel that my basic material is being changed. When you fire clay at around 600 degrees it undergoes a process called 'quartz inversion" where the crystals in the clay body change their molecular structure. If a pot survives this metamorphosis twice, once during the firing and again during cooling a beautiful, hard fired vessel will result. I feel like motherhood is a similar process.

Beautiful handcrafted bags- "Nancybird"

I saw these beautiful bags today at the new Maiocchi shop on Ann St in Brisbane.
They are "Nancybird" bags and wallets created by Melbourne designer Emily Wright.
"Nancybird" is a beautiful business using leather by-products of the meat industry, tanned using analine or vegetable dyes. The fabrics are cotton or jute and chosen for the low environmental impact.
Emily's business doesn't just pay lip service to being sustainable as she has developed her shipping and packing using recycled materials and prefers to send her merchandise flat-packed by sea freight to reduce air miles. If that doesn't impress you then how about this....
"Nancybird" headquarters uses 100% windpower!
But to get to the heart of the matter, these objects are simply beautiful. They capture a ruggedness and practicality in their construction combined with soft femininity and a dash of retro in the use of printed fabric and drawings. The crafted finish is such a pleasure to see in an object such as a bag that is usually created as a disposable, consumer fashion item. You can imagine that these bags would just get better with age. Marks of wear and tear and living enhance such objects.

It is worth saving up to buy such items. My advice for starving artists and others of Very Little Assets is to buy sparingly and buy the best.

connections-songs, art, chandeliers, and walking in the woods.

This movie incorporates everything I love about this world. Creativity, hard work, the building of a home and how deeply, personally connected it is to making things, songs, art, chandeliers, and walking in the woods.


Thanks to Natalie Chanin from Alabama Chanin for bringing it to my attention.

I heART Japan

A group of talented and generous invited artists from around Australia have donated work to be auctioned on eBay as part of the 'I heART japan' charity auction from 8-10 April to aid people affected by the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

The items are beautiful. I especially covet the Mitsuo Shoji bowls

Start bidding here.......

My Nana

My Nana was the first person to give me an appreciation of the soothing powers of a cup of tea served in fine china. Now, when I drink tea and make teacups and teapots it reminds me of all the lovely cups of tea I've had over the years in Nana's old teacups, from the 1970's cup and saucer sets completely covered in gold through to "fine, bone china" cups with roses on the interior. This was just one of the many, many precious things she bought into my life.


She died yesterday at the age of 89.

Japan

For a personal story of one potter, one family in the earthquake zone read Euan Craig's blog

When the world is going crazy and there is bad news from every corner it's important to remember the scope of the disaster is intimate. People have lost their things, their homes are unsafe, their windows are broken and those who survive wake up from nights of broken sleep to have to find water to boil for their kettles and pick their way through rubble to their own kitchens. Euan's bravery and the beauty of his writing will move you to tears.

Porcelain, Glass and an Old Barn- Gympie Road Trip

Last Saturday I drove the back way to Gympie for the opening of "Swamp Cartography".
I love driving through the golden afternoon light, the paddocks flying by, the girls in the back seat chattering about their day and taking mini naps.
We stopped to take photos of this beautiful barn. The crossroads were deserted, all we could hear was the wind in the grass and we were surrounded by the sweet, spicy smell of the afternoon sun on the fields.

For the exhibition we borrowed an old cedar table from a friend and set up a "collectors table" with all our tools and impressions laid out.



The "Swamp Bubbles" looked great in a gallery under real lights

Swamp Cartography The Movie!

I'm pretty excited to present our movie!

Who has the most beautiful tools in all the world? Chris Weaver!

Who has the most beautiful tools in all the world? New Zealand potter Chris Weaver! These tools are made from driftwood collected on the beach outside Chris's studio.

The West Coast of New Zealand is a wild , rugged landscape and Chris says this has forced him to be resourceful and develop his own ways of making.
This series of teapots were inspired by Chris's Grandmother's old metal pressing irons. Although they were inspired by a woman and a prosaic domestic task these pots capture the true grit and determination needed to wield pressing irons and other household tools back in the days before electrical power. They simultaneously encompass femininity of the tough, single minded, Protestant work-ethic variety and the promise of a cup of tea, relaxing, and recharging during a hard days work.

...the final countdown

The Swamp Cartography collaboration is entering a white hot, nerve-wracking, exciting phase as the travelling exhibition begins on the 26th of February at the Gympie Regional Gallery.Exhibition design has never been my strong point and mostly I just opt for white plinths deluding myself that they somehow appear "Classic". We had a very fruitful visit last weekend from Australian ceramicist and teacher Janet de Boos (this doesn't really describe her fabulousness as a supporter and encourager and inspirer of literally hundreds of students, artists and teachers over the past decades) who gently but insistently prodded us into the uncomfortable process of examining our assumptions. This is a process that is totally absent from the everyday studio practice. Compared to my own very gentle examining of my aesthetic motivations Janet's was positively brutal! It was worth enduring the discomfort as Janet's questions forced me to think carefully about every aspect of the exhibition space, how to make it dynamic and how to pare down the ideas until every aspect of the space is resolved so the exhibition becomes an experience drawing the audience into the beauty and isolation of the wallum. This process is so valuable it is worth enduring the discomfort and the exhibition will be a cracker with not a white plinth in sight!

The exhibition commences in Gympie and will trundle on it's way over the next two years encompassing a film launch in Brisbane at the Botanical Gardens in September, an exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane in October , Noosa and Canberra, and Melbourne in 2012....with more to come.

$18 000

The auction of ceramics for Flood Relief raised over $18 000!!!!!!! This is an incredible number when applied to contemporary ceramics. Thanks to Vipoo and all the artists who took part and thanks to all the generous supporters who bid for the pieces.

Flood Relief Ceramic Auction

I'm taking part in a great auction organized by Aussie/Thai legend in his own lunchbox, ceramicist Vipoo Srivlasa. It will be on EBay on Friday the 4th of Feb. All the artists have donated their work to the Flood Relief and, although I hope you are not totally motivated by the thought of a bargain, the bidding starts at very low reserves. I've donated these two pieces

They would retail for over $300 AUD but the bidding starts at $50!!!!!!!!!!

Have a look...and a bid and own some amazing ceramics while relieving flood victims!a tiny sample of the beautiful work available.

Here is what Vipoo has written about his inspiration for this wonderful project.....

"My call out for artists to donate a piece was responded to very well ... overwhelmingly in fact. Artists from all over Australia donated their work for this auction. Some artists come from as far as USA and Canada! The auction will happen online at ebay.com.au Starting from 9.00 pm on Thursday 3 Feb and finish on Sunday 6th Feb at 9.00 pm You can see a preview of the work on Facebook here...

or visit my website. Starting bids are at the discretion of the donor artist and will range from AUS $20 upwards. Please kindly help me promote the auction to anyone you know that might be interested in the auction. We need a lot of bidders to make this auction successful! The following artists have agreed to donate their work.
Akio Takamori (USA)
Andrea Barker (Victoria)
Angela Valamanesh (South Australia)
Avital Sheffer (New South Wales)
Ayumi Horie (USA)
Bridget Bodenham (Victoria)
Carole Epp (Canada)
Christopher Plumridge (Victoria)
Cyrus Tang (Victoria)
Dawn Whitehand (Victoria)
Gerry Wedd (South Australia)
Greg Daly (New South Wales)
Heather Creet (Tasmania)
Irianna Kanellopoulou (Victoria)
Jane Sawyer (Victoria)
Janet DeBoos (Australian Capital Territory)
Janet Mansfield, OAM (New South Wales)
Julie Bartholomew (New South Wales)
Keiko Matsui (New South Wales)
Kenji Uranishi (Queensland)
Kevin White (Victoria)
Lene Kuhl Jakobsen (Victoria)
Louise Boscacci (New South Wales)
Lynda Draper (New South Wales)
Naoko Yehenara (New South Wales)
Paul Aburrow (Victoria)
Robert Doble (UK/Victoria)
Sandra Black (Western Australia)
Shannon Garson (Queensland)
Shin Koyama (Queensland)
Simon Braund (Victoria)
Somchai Charoen (New South Wales)
Sony Manning (Victoria)
Sophie Milne (Victoria)
Tanawat Suttasoontorn (Thailand/Victoria)
Tatiana Gvozdetskia (Victoria)
Vicki Grima (New South Wales)
Vipoo Srivilasa (Thailand/Victoria)

Vipoo Srivilasa is authorised as the promoter for this event and the fundraiser reference number is TF/11/3165 Net proceeds of the funds raised (100%) will go to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal. Donation collected by the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal will be disbursed to the people affected by flooding in Queensland Communities in December 2010 and January 211 The successful bidder is not eligible for a receipt for taxation purpose as they are receiving a benefit in return for the successful bid amount which will be donated to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal. Please contact the Australian Taxation Office should you require further information in relation to the tax deductibility of donations Please note: freight/insurance and any additional fees are to be paid by the successful bidder and arranged with the respective artist.