Steve Harrison, flashed porcelain

OLIERS

December 2007/January 2008 = Volume 43 No. 10

INSIDE
Gallery Ness The Hand of the Other:

President’s Message 3

ote Wood-fired Porcelain

Steve Harrison is an Austrakan potter specializing in wood-fired porcelain.

We find ourselves in an era of shallow consumerism and apparent
wealth in a material sense, but we have never been poorer in time and
quality. We seem to be losing our sense of locality and community, our
corner shops and our independent Australian identity.

My response to this excess of meaningless consumption is to
immerse my self in the hand-crafted, intentionally tmperfect object as
an antidote to this avalanche of new cheap junk. My recent work 1n this
show 1s the result of many years of research. It follows my last show
at the Legge Gallery in Sydney of black ware that I called ‘dirty little
secrets. I was attracted to the intense blackness of this iron-rich rock.
It was black, Rothko black, as black as Churchill’s dog. The blackness
suited my mood at that time, a period of intense introspection, from
which emerged some lovely dark pieces, lifted by the use of paler pastel
glazes, all made from my local environment.

My recent work has been described by Tont Warburton as “radical

Zs

localism” as it 1s almost entirely made from locally
prospected raw materials. Much of it is made from my
local native bat tunze porcelain stone, this is not clay 1n the
normal sense, but ground-up rock. Ground rock dust isn’t
the most promising material to work with, but apart from
the limited plasticity, which restricts the scale and form of
the pieces, there are many fine qualities that my materials

exhibit when wood-fired. I am particularly fond of the POTTERS

intense red and orange flashed porcelain body colour. GUILD
Flashed porcelain isn’t all that common, it intrigues me +» BRITISH

continued on i 7ose COLUMBIA