Les Blakebrough

The New Porcelain
Friday 8 December 2006 to Saturday 13 January 2007

The marriage of the handmade and the pursuit of various methods of limited industrial production have been central concerns of Les Blakebrough since 1957, when he was an apprentice at the Sturt Workshops at Mittagong, NSW. One of the very first tasks that Ivan McMeekin set him was the production of a thousand barrel mugs that McMeekin had learnt to make at Michael Cardew’s Wenford Bridge pottery in Cornwall, UK. All of Blakebrough’s mugs ended up in the waste clay bin but the discipline was exemplary and gave him an unerring ability to control wheel-thrown forms that he continues to exercise in his practice fifty years on.

There has also been an untroubled use of industrial methods that was first aroused when he visited Japan in 1963. In 1996 he recalled one experience in particular – a visit to the ‘factory’ of one hundred throwers busily making a porcelain tea set designed by Kenkichi Tomimoto. The lesson that Blakebrough learnt was that, as a studio potter, once one had sorted out the problems in making a tea set, it was reasonable to let another ‘system’ do the work.¹

Both at Sturt (1957-1972) and in Tasmania since 1973, Blakebrough has constantly devised methods to make ceramics production easier, whether it was finding ways to mechanise the plant or figuring out how to build a trolley kiln that allowed one to stack and fire a large number of pots more efficiently. Furthermore, when he ran the Pot Company as a commercial pottery at Mt Nelson, Tasmania, in the 1980s, he had several apprentices producing works to his design.

However it wasn’t until he won a Churchill Fellowship, taking him to Scandinavia and the UK in 1993, that he could focus on industrial processes in the factories of Royal Copenhagen, Denmark, Arabia, Finland and the Royal Worcester Porcelain Factory, UK. It was a revelation: not only was he able to produce several proto-types that were tested in the factories, but he immediately thought about how to transform the factories’ production systems to a smaller but challenging experimental workshop.

Between 1995-97, along with colleague, Penny Smith, and with the aid of a grant from the Australian Research Council, he set about creating a flexible rollerhead machine at the University of Tasmania in Hobart capable of producing a range of domestic ware in small runs of between 1000 and 10,000 items. Two skilled mould makers from Arabia, Matty Sorsa and Pekka Vuorisalo, were brought to Australia and the researchers were able to design and produce a wide variety of ware including plates, cups, bowls, mugs, creamers and containers. 

This tableware continues to be produced alongside such limited edition projects as the Flora Tasmanica and Tassie Tiger series and the exhibition works for which he is so renowned. The clay used in their production is Southern Ice, the internationally acclaimed porcelain clay that Blakebrough developed in the 1990s and which is now manufactured in relatively large quantities by Clayworks Australia in Dandenong, Victoria.

The use of Southern Ice has also been used to create the beautiful series of exhibition ware – the porcelain forms, vessels, platters and, more recently, the tablets - that have dominated Les Blakebrough’s practice during the past decade or so and are so well represented in this exhibition.

Their distinctive relief decoration is a dominant feature of the pure white Southern Ice porcelain forms. The imagery is generally derived from nature – leaves, grasses, wind patterns on water – although more recently Les Blakebrough has been using the vessels and a series of innovate porcelain ‘open book’ tablets to record passages of text.

In order to achieve the particular qualities of the decoration, the artist paints the images or text on to the still pliable porcelain body using shellac, which is allowed to harden. The artist then gently sponges away the clay surrounding the decoration so that it is left in relief. The forms are usually fired unglazed and the buff surfaces have a lovely velvety texture when handled.

Southern Ice porcelain is renowned for its whiteness and strength and this latter quality allows the artist to create the monumental and yet highly refined forms that exhibit such great translucency. This enhances the decoration and gives these pristine objects their ethereal beauty.  

Jonathan Holmes, November 2006

These exhibition notes were developed from a combination of material written for the current survey of Les Blakebrough’s work, developed by Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design, on show at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and for a forthcoming exhibition and publication, Smart works: design and the handmade, being curated b Grace Cochrane for the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney in March 2007.

¹ Harris, Susan, and et al. Triaxial Blend: Clay Industry and Technology. Rochester, N Y: Bevier Gallery, School of Art and Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1996. 13