5 Stones: bowled over by the beauty a master potter’s art

Steve Harrison has devoted years to researching the traditional arts by which the finest porcelain is made.

Porcelain bowl by Steve Harrison on display in 5 Stones at Watters Gallery, Sydney, until September 2.

Porcelain is the technically most advanced form of ceramics. All civilisations developed earthenware vessels, even long before the invention of the wheel made production easier and faster.

But only the Chinese, after centuries of experimentation, learned to make the fine-bodied, hard and translucent, fully vitrified wares, fired at extremely high temperatures in sophisticated kilns, we call porcelain. The Chinese achieved what we consider to be fully developed porcelain more than 1000 years ago, and for centuries afterwards Chinese wares were precious exports to the Islamic world and to Europe, especially after direct sea routes to the east were opened in the early 16th century.

Europeans were fascinated by the beauty and delicacy of Chinese porcelain and attempted to emulate it, particularly with Dutch Delftware, but it was only in the early 18th century that German ceramicists in Dresden and Meissen first succeeded in replicating true porcelain.

Even today, the process is not generally well understood. Most of us probably assume that a potter orders clay from a wholesaler and gets to work on the wheel. Not Steve Harrison, though, who has devoted decades to researching and experimenting with the traditional arts by which the finest porcelains have been made.

A year or so ago, when I visited him and his wife, Janine King, at their remarkable home and studio in the NSW southern highlands south of Sydney — where they also grow much of their own food and live as far as possible off the grid — I was not surprised to find wheels and kilns, but I had not expected to see impressive grinding machines designed to reduce stone to clay. Of course it is not any stone that can be used in this way, but only a kind of feldspar or mica largely broken down by geological alteration into a softer and more friable form.

This kind of stone is known as sericite, a word that etymologically means “silk stone”, from its texture. Sericite is not as plastic or easy to work as normal clay but it produces the finest porcelain vessels, so Harrison has devoted years of travels to seeking out the most famous deposits and workshops in China, South Korea and Japan, as well as exploring and discovering others in Australia.

Some of the resulting ceramics have been shown in previous exhibitions, but this is the first time that Harrison has displayed, almost encyclopedically, the results of this remarkable quest, which is related in engaging detail in the accompanying publication, Five Stones: A Ceramic Journey.

Harrison refers to the wares as “single-stone ceramics” because each comes from a unique source, unlike the generic porcelain clay mixture that can be bought from a standard supplier. Some have been made from material acquired from famous workshops in Asia in which he was a guest artist; others from stone crushed and processed by Harrison from rocks collected at original sites in Asia or at those that he has found in Australia. All the vessels have been thrown by the master potter and some have been fired in the traditional workshops he visited.

Each of these 80 or so works is unique in its material and in the history attached to the place from which it came, and all of these details are duly noted on the exhibition list. The place of making and firing, and the processes and nature of the kilns are equally significant, whether at one of the centuries-old Asian workshops or in Australia.

They are also unique in their form, which is especially notable as all of them are bowls. Harrison has made many other ceramic wares in his career, but here he has confined himself, by a kind of minimalist discipline, to the simplest yet potentially the most perfect and satisfying of shapes. This fundamental form, however, is capable of infinite nuances, like the refinements of playing a musical instrument.

Thus some are taller, some wider; they vary in size, too, although most are of small to medium dimensions. The rim can be more or less open, spreading outwards, or relatively closed, turning slightly inwards; some are almost completely straight, with an impassive stillness. The foot, too, can vary: more or less pronounced, more or less distinct in shape from the main body of the bowl.

And finally there are the glazes, again endlessly varied although mostly within the blue-green range of celadon, yet some are almost white and a few unglazed pieces, of Australian material high in iron oxide, are brown. The simplicity of the forms, by eliminating superficial differences, leads us to contemplate the subtle factors that make each of these bowls quite individual, reminding us once again that, in the potter’s art, consummate beauty arises above all from attention, humility and restraint.

Steve Harrison: 5 Stones Watters Gallery, Sydney, until September 2.