National Art School showcases ceramics by Rushforth, Choung et al

The art of ceramics is perhaps humankind’s oldest, and it’s thriving at the National Art School in Sydney.

Juz Kitson’s installation Outside the Symbolic Order. From the exhibition Turn, Turn, Turn at the National Art School, Sydney. Picture: Peter Morgan

One of the central myths of a mass society concerns the value of individual experience. The more life is flattened into the routines of office and factory, the more advertisers and the manufacturers of mass entertainment employ the mirage of a vivid personal life to seduce their customers. Thus we see everywhere advertising campaigns that promise excitement — often explicitly contrasted with the drudgery of everyday existence — to those who buy their products. Others urge us to pay for holidays that will leave us with wonderful memories.

The worst of this is not the tragicomic thought of an office worker seeking solace in hazy recollections of last summer’s nightclubbing in Thailand, but the fact that subjective experience is turned into a kind of material possession. Some people show off their cars or art collections, some recount their meals at expensive restaurants, and others regale you with the list of their expensive travel adventures. Travel, which should be a kind of learning, turns into another manifestation of acquisition.

This myth of personal experience has naturally produced the equally questionable myth of personal expression. About a half century ago, a collection of confused ideologies led to the development of educational policies whose damage is still being felt today. Children were not taught grammar, for example, in case it hindered their creativity; but of course you can no more express yourself in writing than on the piano without first learning the instrument and its technique. These misconceived policies produced a generation of teachers who could barely identify the subject of a sentence. The gravest long-term result of this has probably been the drastic decline in state comprehensive schooling.

Art was particularly affected by this postwar ideology of de-skilling, which first overran colleges and then filtered into the school system, becoming and, thanks to generational lag, remaining entrenched in syllabuses even in the new national curriculum. Here again the underlying fear is that the discipline of learning particular skills and techniques will compromise the student’s freedom of expression.

It is not hard to see the reverse is true, and that expression of any kind is possible only after one has mastered the means of expression in any given medium. But beyond the obvious, there is also a more interesting principle, one that concerns what we might call the depth of expression.

If you ask either secondary or tertiary art students simply to express themselves, without any other stipulation, what most of them will produce will be not only indifferent in quality but often almost indistinguishable in kind, in no way an adequate representation of the actual differences of character and temperament among the individuals.

If on the other hand you set them a specific task with closely defined parameters of subject, size and medium, you may be surprised to find that they produce works that are distinctly different and in which certain aspects of character and temperament seem to reveal themselves quite clearly. Contrary to the most common cliches about art, boundaries and constraints seem to enable a deeper and more complex form of expression.

The reason for this is that unconstrained expression arises from the most superficial levels of the self, the epidermal layers of desires and fears combined with unthinking habits shaped by the mass cultural environment. The flotsam and jetsam of the ego, as it turns out, are much the same in all individuals within a given sociocultural milieu.

Constraints and boundaries, on the other hand, by forcing us to solve objective problems and deal with external realities both within the phenomenal world and in the nature of the media with which we are working, take us to a more impersonal and universal level of consciousness. But in the process, unexpectedly, we discover a subtler level of individuality, not in the egoic self but in qualities of imaginative vision and sensibility that are unique to each mind but only manifest themselves when we are occupied with something that transcends the ego.

Any art form that requires submission to a demanding and difficult craft helps to free us from the superficial ego, and music is, once again, an obvious example, since it is impossible to make music without learning to play an instrument and mastering conventions and traditions. The same is ultimately true of all visual arts as well, but because the ideology of de-skilling was particularly directed at the drawing and painting of the late academic tradition, it is often assumed that you can indeed paint without skill or discipline.

And that is why most of the painting that comes out of art schools is so poor, so shallow and so ultimately indistinguishable from all other art college painting. And it helps explain why most art students stop making art as soon as they leave art school; the roots of their practice never go beyond the most superficial level of the ego.

Other media studied at art school present immediate technical demands before the student can even begin to think that they are making a work of art. Printmaking and sculpture are cases in point. But no medium is as demanding of skill (and humility) as ceramics, and specifically the art of wheel-throwing.

The potter practises what is perhaps the oldest art of civilisation. The potter’s wheel is about 5000 years old, and ceramics had already been hand-built and fired for millennia before that, from the time when the domestication of crops and especially of the grape and the olive produced a demand for durable waterproof vessels. From huge storage vases to the most refined tablewares, from Attic vases to Chinese porcelain or Japanese tea ceremony cups, ceramics have long been inseparable both from the necessities and the pleasures of life around the world.

The practice of wheel-throwing requires focus and presence of mind, for the initial ball of clay must be thrown down into the centre of the already turning wheel. The spinning is hypnotic, the touch of the hand must be determined but gentle, and when the potter is skilful the amorphous lump seems to blossom magically into a vessel.

The process is so absorbing and so much involved with its own ancient and diverse set of traditions that ceramics can tend to stand apart from all other departments in an art school. At the National Art School in Sydney — where I lectured for 12 years — the department of ceramics had indeed once been a separate school, and the fact that the head of ceramics was for many years the deputy director of the NAS seemed to reflect this special status.

In fact, although the history of the NAS goes back to the middle of the 19th century, the school of ceramics began with the appointment of Peter Rushforth as the first tenured teacher of the subject in 1951, and it is fittingly with Rushforth’s beautiful and impressive works that the survey exhibition at the NAS gallery opens. The rich colours and textures of Rushforth’s glazes remind us indeed that the work of the wheel is only the first part of the potter’s art; the second is the art and science of glazing and of kiln firing.

The exhibition title refers to studio ceramics, to distinguish these pieces from the industrially produced kitchen and table wares, of varying price and quality, that had become the norm in households both rich and poor. The studio ceramic movement was a modern rediscovery of the potter’s art specifically inspired by the craft traditions of East Asia; the most influential exponent of this movement was Bernard Leach, whose A Potter’s Book, published in 1940, became a fundamental reference work.

Leach himself had studied in Japan, and Australian potters followed his example in the postwar years. Rushforth and others visited Japan, Korea and China and found inspiration in the traditions that have produced the finest ceramics ever made. In turn, visiting teachers from these countries came to Australia, and this exchange formed the basis for the teaching at the NAS, evolving over the years and, as is clear from the present exhibition — curated by Glenn Barkley, former Museum of Contemporary Art curator and himself a potter — open to a diversity of stylistic variations.

The exhibition confronts us from the outset with the contrast between the classic potter’s art, represented by the work of Rushforth, and the more hybrid style of Stephen Bird, displayed in a wall of plates, often with self-referential and meta-ceramic motifs. Behind this is one of the most fascinating parts of the exhibition, a collection of pots displayed informally on racks, recalling the set-up of a potter’s studio.

A printed list helps you find your way through the 128 numbered pieces. Among the most impressive are a powerful vase by Kwirak Choung, decisive in overall form and yet acknowledging something of the informal and random in its opening. Another outstanding piece is Ivan McMeekin’s Black Tenmoku bowl, elegant and simple with its unglazed foot. Brett Stone’s Staged stack presents a set of very fine bowls in a deliberately self-effacing manner, and Joy Warren has a beautiful celadon bowl with exquisitely refined glazes offset by a slight informality in the shape.

The remainder of the exhibition, mostly upstairs, focuses on a number of important ceramic artists who have played important roles in the history of the school, from Alan Peascod to Janet Mansfield and Merran Esson. Each of these substantial artists is covered by a group of pieces selected to give a sense of the range of possibilities, from traditional to experimental, within the practice of ceramics today.

In the latter mode, the most striking are without doubt Juz Kitson’s extravagant and even outlandish, yet undeniably impressive, assemblages of ceramic objects with fur, feather, animal horn and other organic materials. The overall impression is of a kind of barbaric trophy, and the ovoid ceramic forms recall those that adorned the ancient Diana of Ephesus, long misunderstood as multiple breasts but in reality the testicles of bulls sacrificed in the eastern cult of Artemis.

If Kitson’s work recalls the world of primitive ritualistic beliefs within which ceramics originated in the ancient Near East, Steve Harrison’s represents the culmination of the art of the ­potter in the East Asian traditions. His deceptively simple and yet refined and serene vessels are the product of the humble, meditative practice of the potter’s art and reflect, indeed, his own choice of a life in harmony with his aesthetic ideals.

These are works that ostensibly seek only to serve the craft and subsume themselves to its formal demands, which make no attempt to claim our attention with brash or sensational effects, and yet which silently draw us to them by the force and conviction of their integrity.

Turn Turn Turn: The Studio Ceramics Tradition at the National Art School

National Art School Gallery. National Art School, Sydney. Until August 8.