Garnish, Light Square Gallery
July 28 – August 19
A Potter’s Landscape: Jeff Mincham
JamFactory, August 7 – September 26
Souvenir: Ceramic Mementos by Gerry Wedd
Bay Discovery Centre, July 30 – October 19

CERAMICS exhibitions during the SALA festival were defiantly crafty, running counter to the unifying global trends that depersonalise designer products. As an antidote to such stylistic codes, ceramics on display in Adelaide during August were comfortingly local, idiosyncratic and steeped in the long history of ceramics. The strength and diversity of ceramics by such respected practitioners as Gerry Wedd, Jeff Mincham, Bruce Nuske, Stephen Bowers (Adelaide Central Gallery) and by Angela Valamanesh (at the Barr Smith Library) would appear to put the lie to claims in some quarters that ceramics are in decline.

Most recently I read a throwaway comment to this effect by Canberra curator Mary Eagle in the August issue of Art Monthly magazine. Perhaps she failed to look far beyond her own parish limits, or else was commenting outside her area of expertise. Or does the problem run deeper?

With one exception, all the ceramic artists exhibiting during SALA were mid-career graduates of programs in the 1970s and 1980s, when ceramics departments were flourishing. It would be more accurate to say that ceramics training is in decline, with ceramics departments being closed down as tertiary institutions stream students into “multi-skilling” (non-media specific) art or design courses. This downgrading of the teaching of ceramic skills, and the subordinating of working with clay to a branch of either sculpture or industrial design, is in stark contrast to the opposite approach in glass training, where practice-based skills development is a contributing factor to the wave of international recognition for young Australian glass artists.

At the Bay Discovery Centre in the Glenelg Town Hall, Gerry Wedd celebrated Glenelg history and its seaside culture with a wonderfully wry collection of ceramic memorabilia. The Old Gum Tree, football hero Ken Eustace and townscape scenarios of the Glenelg all become subject matter for his mock willow-pattern ware. There is the teapot entitled Don Tempting Fate which portrays Dunstan “holding back the predicted end of the world at Glenelg Jetty”. Another shows an old “teapot bag lady” who was part of local folk-lore, holidaying on the lawns outside the council offices. Best of all are flights of ceramic thongs cunningly adorned with incongruous iconography, including a skull, the skeleton of a foot, and the old gum tree. Wedd’s exhibition shows what craft is good at, and why it will never be absorbed successfully within the rubric of the design profession.

At the JamFactory, Jeff Mincham staked out very different territory, drawing inspiration from the Australian landscape while paying homage to ceramic traditions filtered through Bernard Leach, and then the Australian ceramics movement. An array of pots, large and small, spanned his career over the past 20 years, though the majority of exhibits were recent.

There were some magnificent works, notably the impressive hand-built vessel Erosion (2001), with organic ridges in rusty hues evoking the tonal nuances of the Australian landscape, and Geomorphic Vessel (1999), where the rhythmic ridged pattern is accentuated by a delicious patinated copper blue glaze. His Reed series of vessels (2004), with scraffito decoration against a deep brown glaze, have a beauty that is strongly grounded in the tones and textures of the natural environment.

As a retrospective, however, the exhibition was a half-baked attempt. It lacked curatorial direction, with a patchy selection of Mincham’s prolific output from earlier periods and the need for a more rigorous eye in pruning weaker works. The display and catalogue failed to trace his evolution in a coherent manner and the list of works was chronologically all over the shop.

While Mincham is influenced by Asian ceramic traditions, his contemporary Bruce Nuske has evolved a personal idiom that adapts European decorative traditions with considerable imaginative flair and impressive technical finesse. For SALA, he exhibited a body of new work in company with young ceramist Honor Freeman and textile designer Annabelle Collett, as part of Garnish at Light Square Gallery.

Nuske, who is head of ceramics at Adelaide TAFE, exhibits rarely and is something of a potter’s potter. In an eloquent and authoritative essay on Nuske in Australian Ceramics magazine, Stephen Bowers comments: “He (Nuske) is using those subtle understandings of materials and techniques that give craft objects their unmistakable qualities and appeal, qualities that industrial manufacturers and designers who work at a remove from direct handcrafting are unable to achieve … His neo-Victorian teapots, a confluence of Oriental and European bloodlines, are elegant reminders of much that is unfashionable in the world of studio ceramics nowadays.”

Nuske’s teapots combine decorative refinement and functional design, with fastidious attention to detailing of lids, handles and spouts. However, it must be said that this decorative finesse worked best on a small scale. He was less successful with the larger vessels, which lacked the delicacy and intricate decoration of the teapots. I found the figurative works least successful of all, weighed down with unclear intentions and fitting too aptly the artist’s own self-deprecating title: “Plainly ornate and extravagantly meaningless”.

Honor Freeman, a recent graduate of the South Australian School of Art and then JamFactory, comes from a younger generation. Her work in Garnish reveals a totally different aesthetic, characterised by far less concern with ceramic traditions and more with positioning her work as contemporary art. Her deft handling of clay and active imagination enable her to carry off her ideas, while teetering close to the precipice of preciousness. In her hands porcelain becomes other unlikely things. Tupperware lids in fetching pastel shades are piled together, curled with use, amid a few mismatched containers (just like my Tupperware collection, except I have more containers and many missing lids).

Freeman turns hard porcelain into soft, spongy materials. Cakes of soap sit atop drab kitchen sponges, their original pastel shades discoloured by use. Corner sections of mattresses, an electrical plug and a light switch – all play tricks, persuading us for a moment that they are not really clay at all. It is clever, humorous, obsessive, idiosyncratic.

No, Mary Eagle, ceramics are not in decline. As for contemporary art, well, that may be quite another matter entirely.