Behind the wheel of potter Peter Rushforth

THE first things that strike you about Peter Rushforth's pottery are its integrity, simplicity and consistency.

Large Blossom Jar by Peter Rushforth

CERAMICS is one of the oldest human arts, almost coeval with civilisation, that is with the beginning of agriculture and life in cities. Hunter-gathers live from day to day and everyone is involved in the quest for subsistence.

The domestication of grains and other plants changes the rhythm of existence. Henceforward, food is grown by one class of the population only in an annual cycle of tilling, planting and harvesting; instead of being gathered daily, large stocks are produced at seasonal intervals.

These stocks need to be managed so they are not consumed all at once; they have to be shared among a community that now includes an ever-increasing number of people not directly involved in food production but in other occupations - from cobblers to soldiers, scribes and priests - and above all, sufficient reserves must be retained for the following year's planning. New ways of thinking arise about nature, society, justice and even time.

But the new reserves also have to be stored and preserved for long periods of time. Hunter-gatherers can make do with rudimentary vessels of leaves or bark, as they collect food every day and need to carry or store it for very short periods. Grain stocks, however, and even more obviously olive oil and wine, require strong and stable vessels if they are to be stored safely, let alone transported and traded.

The answer was found in earthenware ceramics, originally made in the same fertile riverlands that also favoured the invention of agriculture. Pots were hand-built at first, and as we saw in discussing the Neolithic ceramics of Cyprus last year, some continued to be made in this way even after the invention of the wheel - significantly both as cartwheel and as potter's wheel - 5000 to 6000 years ago.

As the Cypriot pots reminded us too, the need to make something useful almost at once brought with it another profound instinct, the desire to make these things beautiful. Great ceramics were produced in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean tradition continued to produce fine works in a variety of styles through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and early modern period. But nowhere else were ceramics brought to the level of sophistication achieved in China, and then Korea and Japan, and from the time of the opening of sea routes to the east, European ceramics were overshadowed by the superior imported wares, which appear, for example, in so many still-life paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Europe was particularly fascinated by the fine body and high-fired hardness of Chinese porcelain, which were not successfully reproduced until the middle of the 18th century. But by this time the industrial revolution was changing the face of crafts across the Western world, and ceramics too became the object of mass manufacturing, even if some very elegant wares were produced by the firms that made dinner services for the wealthy as well as the poorer classes.

The result, in any case, was that ceramics evolved from workshop to mass production, and its manufacture, which had never been taken seriously in the modern West as a form of artistic expression, was reduced to a question of industrial design. It was only in the 20th century, with the rediscovery of the Eastern potter's craft, particularly by Bernard Leach, the enormously influential author of A Potter's Book (1940), that an appreciation of the immense richness of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese tradition - including countless styles both more refined and more informal than the standard export wares - reached a broader audience than a handful of connoisseurs and collectors, and inspired a new movement of practice in the West.

This craft or studio pottery tradition was almost at once taken up in Australia as well, and we have just lost two very important members of the local movement: Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, who died last month, had for many years produced exquisitely fine cups, bowls and bottles that she assembled in still-life groups recalling the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. Janet Mansfield, who died earlier this year, was both a distinguished potter and a tireless worker for the cause of ceramic arts, holding the presidency of the International Academy of Ceramics from 2005 to 2012, publishing several journals and hosting a triennial international conference at her property and workshop at Gulgong, NSW.

Fortunately the great potter represented in a beautiful retrospective at SH Ervin Gallery is still working, even at his now venerable age. Peter Rushforth (born in 1920) first came into contact with the culture of Japan, which was to be so important to him, as a prisoner of war at Changi. Later he studied pottery under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme before beginning his long association with the National Art School (then known as East Sydney Technical College), where he taught from 1951 to 1978. In 1963 he spent five months in Japan working with traditional potters and, after his retirement from the NAS, he established his own pottery works in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

The first things that strike you about Rushforth's work are its integrity, simplicity and consistency. These are clearly qualities of the man, but they are also inherent to the potter's craft and explain why such a man is drawn to the practice. For there is no faking it with the wheel: as anyone who has watched a potter at work, or tried it themselves, knows well, it is a process that is deceptively simple in appearance and extremely difficult to do well, demanding high levels of manual skill and mental presence.

In architecture - before a temple or inside a cathedral - we wonder at the mystery of shapeless stone metamorphosed into ideal form. The potter starts with something as amorphous and even less stable in its properties: a mass of wet clay that is thrown down on to the already spinning wheel. It needs to be thrown into the very centre of the wheel if the pot is to be symmetrical. Then, thumbs and fingers controlling the thickness of the body as the lump is hollowed out, a master potter can pull up a flower-like vase out of nothingness before our eyes.

But the potter's art is not just about will or form mastering matter. In reality, it also has to accommodate the intransigent physical realities of the clay itself, and the still more mysterious and not wholly predictable process of firing in the kiln. The result is no two pieces are identical, but far from detracting from their beauty, this only makes it more poignant, because we sense in each case the balance achieved between mind and matter in the pursuit of form.

The idea or poetic sense of the works is a distinctive one, particularly in the many blossom jars, variations on a round form with a narrow opening at the top. The roundness and fullness are common, but no two are exactly alike in the distribution of fullness between shoulder and belly; no two have precisely the same profile, and so each seems to have a distinct character. The common theme is an evocation of abundance and fruitfulness - vases are a feminine symbol in all cultures that have ceramics - but this is counterpointed with the small and discreet opening at the top, whether with or without a neck.

And a vase is not simply a clay body. It is also the glaze that colours and indeed covers it, like a mantle that may leave part of the body revealed, especially around the foot. And this second aspect of the potter's art requires another kind of skill, both in mixing the materials of the glaze and in firing. For glazes are not like paints, whose colours can be seen and adjusted as they are applied. Glazes are, comparatively speaking, applied blind because they will only assume their definitive hues and textures in the firing process.

Nor is this transformation straightforward and predictable, since the actual colour produced may vary dramatically according to conditions in the kiln: not just the temperature, but above all the presence or absence of oxygen inside the kiln during the firing, as well as the timing of heating and cooling. Thus it is even clearer in the glazing and firing than in the throwing that the potter's art is one of constant negotiation and equilibrium between the artist's mind and the physical realities of matter and nature.

What this means is unexpected things can happen, and random effects eventuate, even in the hands of the master. Such unintended variations are not welcome if you are trying to produce identical multiples on a vast scale, as was first the case with the huge industry of export wares in our early modern period (corresponding to the Ming and early Qing dynasties in China). But the greatest East Asian potters in all periods acknowledged an element of the aleatory, especially in the patterns of glazes, that made each piece unique and gave it a mysterious kinship with nature.

Random and accidental effects were embraced by the Japanese potters who made cups for the tea ceremony, itself influenced by Zen Buddhism and Shinto nature-spirituality. The presence of the contingent was not taken as a failure of craftsmanship but as evidence of a harmony between the artistic idea and nature - an acceptance of the casual all the more striking in the context of the formality of the tea ceremony.

Rushforth's glazes are as beautiful as the forms of his pots and even more mysterious. Once again, no two are the same, even when many are in a general sense alike. The colours, the viscosity, above all the internal variation of patterning and colour flecking are endlessly various. Some of the blue Chun glazes suggest landscapes, but always like something seen in a dream; others, in their extraordinary chromatic cascades, recall the veils of colour and luminescence hanging in the sky in the northern lights.

One can't help feeling how far more effective these glazes are than the analogous effects sometimes sought by abstract painters. Painting has other strengths. But Rushforth's glazes are quite different: each involves, as we have said, the manipulation of something that cannot be completely anticipated, something produced only by entering into a partnership with forces beyond rational control and trusting to the chance of natural process. The potter's art, which gives form to the formless and conjures up colours it cannot see, is a kind of alchemy, and its deep affinity with nature is what ultimately makes the hanging blue veils of light on these vases seem like glimpses of the cosmos itself.

All Fired Up: Peter Rushforth, Potter, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, until August 25.