Art soothed turmoil for master potter Peter Rushforth
Master potter Peter Rushforth’s early life in suburban Manly was marred by war but he refused to become embittered
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WITH the death of Peter Rushforth, friends of “the father of Australian studio pottery” are left to wonder whether the Zen-like qualities of his life and work were a triumph over his tragic early life.
Rushforth was 94 when he died on July 22, weeks after attending the opening at the National Art School of a major pottery exhibition called Turn, Turn, Turn.
“That night was so special,” artist and NAS historian Deborah Beck said.
“He was just sitting there, smiling, and everybody was almost bowing to him. Young students (were) coming up and sitting at his feet.”
Pictures of Rushforth and his wife Bobbie on the night show a happy man, as modest and gentle as he was reputed to have been.
LEGACY OF WAR
Rushforth’s early life in suburban Manly was marred, and he could easily have become embittered. His father, a World War I veteran, left the family and never returned.
“That was one of the great mysteries of Pete’s life,” said the potter Bill Samuels, who met Rushforth in 1966 and remained very close to him. “He was about 12 years old and his father just left. (The father) had served in the First World War. When he came home, life was pretty difficult, as it was for a lot of families.
“Pete really spent most of his life looking for his dad. I don’t mean Monday to Friday, but it was something that played on his mind for a lot of his life. What made it worse was his mum died a couple of years later.”
Rushforth had a younger sister, Judy. Compelled to leave school early, he worked as a trainee theatre manager at Fox Films.
SURVIVING CHANGI
Just before his 20th birthday, Rushforth enlisted in the army and had a clerical posting to Darwin followed by Singapore. On the fall of Singapore, he was interned in the Changi prisoner of war camp. In 1943 he spent time working on the Thai-Burma Railway before being sent back to Changi until war’s end. Although he suffered terribly during the war, he rarely mentioned it. In Changi, Rushforth played his beloved chess and carved chess pieces. He even fashioned small objects from the local clay.
Chess helped “save Rushforth’s sanity” in Changi, Samuels said. “One of the games that he memorised was the opening to the Queen’s Gambit,” he said. “He played it a lot.”
Returning to Australia, Rushforth studied ceramics at the Melbourne Technical College and established a studio in Ferntree Gully before returning to Sydney in 1950 to teach pottery at East Sydney Tech (now the National Art School).
A WORLD ART
He married Bobbie in 1951 and they moved to Beecroft. In 1956, Rushforth and others established the Potters Society of Australia, which laid a firm framework for an Australian ceramic tradition to develop. Rushforth was its first president.
In 1963 he spent five months in Japan working alongside traditional potters at Koishiwara in Kyushu and studying in Mashiko under Shimaoka, whose teacher had been the great Shoji Hamada. In 1969 the Rushforth family, now with three daughters, moved to Church Point.
A Churchill Fellowship took Rushforth to Scandinavia, India, the US and the UK.
He retired from East Sydney Tech in 1978, but not before he had fostered cross-cultural ties with leading potters from Japan, China and Korea.
Particularly influenced by Oriental pottery traditions, which he absorbed at the National Gallery of Victoria while studying in Melbourne, he valued the quiet beauty and spirituality found in the pots of the masters.
He believed the “human qualities” of handmade objects were a natural balance to a world gone digital and to the “sterility of mass produced articles”.
MOUNTAIN RETREAT
After retiring, Rushforth moved to a picturesque home in Blackheath where he kept making ceramics until about two years ago.
He has been honoured with two retrospective exhibitions, in 1985 at the NGV and in 2013 at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.
Samuels said people were the most important thing in Rushforth’s life.
“He knew everybody locally, and they knew him,” he said.
A memorial will be held on August 16 at 1pm at Blackheath Community Hall. Memories and anecdotes about this wonderful man are bound to flow.
Originally published as Art soothed turmoil for master potter Peter Rushforth
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