Above and beyond function: Ray Hearn explains the reasons behind his useless ceramics.

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ONCE EVERYTHING WAS MADE BY HAND but now hardly anything is. You can still get handmade ceramics, but these are a marginal status for a marginal appetite. Rumours of ceramics' death by plastic are exaggerated, but the low level of interest in ceramics seems to accurately reflect the current state of our material culture. Today a cup of coffee is just as likely to come in cardboard or styrofoam rather than ceramic--and if it does it was probably made in China.

Time is money and few of us appear to have enough of either commodity. Globalisation is about profits not people. Once this world and the next were held to be much closer together, and ceramics held an important place in both. Not just utilitarian, ceramics also spoke of intrinsic values--of spirituality, ritual and ceremony, both within and beyond function.

In 1968 I was a third-year ceramics' student at Ballarat School of Mines, and while influenced by the critical thrust of McCaughey's review (see opposite), was no less enamoured with clay--its ability to take and hold a new shape almost as if by magic, the thrill of a glaze firing, and clay's thousands of years of heritage; both fire and the potters wheel among the earliest of technologies. Fragile but permanent, clay is one of the most significant of cultural indicators, for clay is ubiquitous, is and always has been at the heart of our daily lives.

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I knew that I was committed to a career in ceramics, and wanted to work with clay, but it seemed that I needed to separate the purely functional from the art aesthetic. I needed to search out those "intrinsic honesties", and to refer to those values and meanings for clay within my own work. This paper is about that search, or the almost 40 years part of it so far. For one of my first exhibitions after graduating, not before--a tea set for the exam piece--I surveyed the available mass-produced ceramics and purchased the cheapest teapot I could find. It was a nasty little object--a thin poorly balanced slipcast item with a spout guaranteed to dribble out no more than lukewarm tea, but at 49c it was more than 20 times cheaper than my own handmade teapot. How could this work for a then unknown young potter?

Taking from McCaughey's review the references to archaeologists and archives, I ceremoniously buried the teapot under the gum tree in the front yard, and erected over it a memorial tombstone. Although the tombstone and the gum tree are no longer extant, as far as we know the teapot is still there, awaiting discovery (and judgement) by that future archaeologist.

However, almost 40 years later, one cannot say with any conviction that the 49c teapot rests entirely in peace. Mass-produced then was often likely to be cheap and nasty, and at that time people did look for handmade. But now, unlike past eras, even unto William Morris and the original crafts revival, most factory ceramics today is slick, well made, cheap--and so highly competitive.

The 49c teapot's equal today is a handmade stoneware coffee cup which costs $38 (Skepsi Gallery on Swanston). (3) At Big W supermarket this amount would almost purchase two 20-piece dinner sets (on special at $19.87 each, made in China), or several thousand styrofoam cups. Is there a lowest common denominator to the handmade's price?

The handmade mug is not priced entirely out of context of upmarket department stores, but it is well beyond the everyday domestic ware, as a quite OK mug from South Melbourne market costs but two dollars. And a cup of coffee at most of those boutique coffee shops that seem to have sprung up on every street corner, the coffee comes in disposable cardboard cups; you don't even get your coffee in a ceramic cup here anymore.

Norris Ioannou feels that both the maker and the user could, and should, have an inter-related part in our material culture, and that this relationship then should also encompass the aesthetic relationship usually deemed the province of the artist. But art is a difficult beast to classify, and in general the relationship between makers and users is tenuous at best, and most handmade ceramics are purchased as a gift, a third party the end user.

Values of functionality, aesthetic strength and cost of handmade 'one-off ' compared to mass-produced continue to plague ceramics. At the lowest common denominator is competition from functional but mass-produced wares, at the other end of the scale is the desire for the unique work to be priced according to its value as art--not an easy situation to define or resolve. Still today the concern from craftspeople so widely expressed is an economic one--a wish to be able to add a couple of zeros to the price of a platter or bowl--'just like art'.

Discussions about the role of studio pottery seem doomed to end up as nothing more than grist for the art-craft, or rather the craft-art debate since art is rarely a participant in this one-sided irresolvable and time-wasting exercise. (It's worth noting the art world seems singularly unconcerned about such trivia).

At first glance my functional practice and philosophy might appear mutually exclusive, but one has informed the other in a symbiotic relationship. My research was in large part into historical Thai ceramics, a thrilling adventure because of the dearth of information left by the potters themselves or those who dealt with them. Consider the impact celadon and other Chinese wares on a material culture that before had no glazed ceramics at all, and a family-based production that took on the Chinese export market. As well as roof and floor tiles, unusual in South East Asia, temples were decorated with ceramic sculptures.

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One who knew how to work as a potter and to woodfire as those ancient potters did could more logically interpret forensic evidence gathered at kiln sites. In turn material culture informs my understanding of the role of ceramics today; but compared to Thai production, can that thrill still be found here in Australia?

End Game suggests a climax of a tactical and intellectual struggle, in ceramics or chess, but it is also about beginnings and endings, for in chess the king can never be captured--one game ends and the board is reset so the next can begin. I made this piece at the start of my PhD work, acknowledging then that as there were once potters so too there are potters today--and tomorrow.

The ceramic pieces were all collected in Tanon Suthep, one of Chiang Mai's streets. The board is a fragment of white tiles from a pharmacy building being remodelled, the bowl is a broken fast food noodle bowl from the ubiquitous street stalls, and the new small blue and white jars purchased from a market stall. Typical of my work, the objects are familiar--they might be just like ones we have at home today, had but threw away only yesterday, or objects we might purchase tomorrow.

Clay lives on, and the ceramic 'game' starts again too. As it transpires End Game is about my own work too. All research degrees require an end--a thesis must reach a conclusion, and like a game of chess, start again. The sculptural potential of clay is unlimited, and in theory functional clay wares' aesthetic potential unlimited too, from a classic Song celadon to Arneson's genital encrusted teapots (which I first saw illustrated in Craft Horizons 1971). West Coast funk with its kitschy teapots and cups were vehicles for sculptural objects never meant to be drunk from, and a genre of useless functional wares emerged. Nothing could be more useless in a practical sense than a work of art, especially a painting--yet most craftwork has a passing reference at least to function.

Domestic pottery forms are undoubtedly full of sculptural or painterly potential, remembering that most-wheel thrown work is restricted by the use of a mechanical device, the potter's wheel, that is a receptive if repetitive tool for clay's almost magical plasticity, but producing only vertical round and bilaterally symmetrical forms.

There is a long tradition of decorative European ceramics from Toby jugs to Wedgewood, and in other art forms from Dutch still-life paintings to Olive Cotton's photo of teacups monumental in feel or Picasso's Glass of Absinthe. Col Levy once remarked that jugs are all bird forms--all throat, belly and plumage. Deborah Halpern, whose survey exhibition was at the National Gallery of Victoria, noted that ceramics seems to her to be linked to function, an assertion she likes to challenge by determinedly making her work nonfunctional as her teapots have three spouts or three long legs.

Post-modernity's tentacles embrace all sorts of activity previously not considered art in a modernist sense. From an ethnic fish trap to a knitted jumper, from a shark in formaldehyde to a crumpled bed, anything at all whatsoever it seems may be deemed art. But craft seems to need to be nice--well made and in good taste, criteria not applicable to Tracy Emin's Turner prizewinning bed and its attendant intimate bits and pieces. And Hirst's shark sculpture was constructed by others, entirely untouched by the artist's own hand. Anything these days can be, and is, art. The problem is that on the other hand not anything can necessarily be deemed craft which, traditionally anyway, operates in a specific band of technical, functional and aesthetic restrictions.

Almost 40 years after McCaughey's 1968 comments, Penny Webb reviewed Gwyn Hanssen Pigott's A Survey 1955-2005. The review titled 'Full Circle on the Wheel of Destiny' themed a young woman who is inspired by a collection of Chinese ceramics, and then, many years later, more than 50 years later, her own pots are to be presented beside those same venerable wares.

'Full circle' might also be taken in reference to the two reviews, McCaughey's of H. R. Hughan and Webb's of Hanssen Pigott, for she is one of our leading practitioners of today, just as Hughan was in his. But, in the former, pottery was not art; while in the latter, pottery has become art.

Hanssen Pigott's pots are no longer just the individual pots of a domestic potter, but art--still-lifes--static groups of bowls and bottle forms: "the chronology from production ware to objet d'art, or from domestic utensils to objects of contemplation". (6) To explain this, Webb notes of these works the Morandi still-life paintings Hanssen Pigott is influenced by, but to me somehow much more spooky because they are real. And, with a fine irony, at the commercial gallery show held at the same time, these are worth a fortune.

Patsy Hely notes the importance of the photographic references--rectangular horizontal format, key colour, flattened viewing space and one preferred perspective point. (7) To me this connection is a poignant link to the human condition, neatly expressed in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, an often morbid dissertation on the links of photography with time and death.

The length of time spent, Hanssen Pigott commitment and dedication and craft skills are not to be discounted in the art world either but, finally, and most significantly to me, her transition from potter to artist is clearly spelled out by Baudrillard's observations about function: "Beyond functional purpose, ceramics serves an important purpose indeed as signifiers." (10)

My current assemblages, following Baudrillard, explore the role of the ceramic medium beyond functional, decorative or collectable item to cultural artefact and challenge the relationship between makers and users. Recognisable as production ware but broken, bashed, scratched and otherwise distorted, they are no longer objects that could belong in the kitchen.

These small-scale sculptures of vessel forms, such as Unstill Life, are altered production ware, largely as they were collected from recycle bins at the end of an assembly line at the Indra Ceramics factory in Lamphang, northern central Thailand. Indra, one of about 100 factories in that city, specialises in hand painted but otherwise slip-cast or jigger and jolly wares, with orders mainly for Europe.

I worked here on and off for a couple of years now towards an exhibition at the factory. The opportunity to make work in Australia, in a similar association of potter and factory, has now long gone. My work there represent full cycle as the research was based on mostly broken ancient ceramics 500 or more years old; these new pieces were made five minutes ago. They signal a fresh start, or at least an altered direction from the PhD pieces. Like End Game, there is beginning and ending, and in a more universal context, the work may be seen to parallel the wheel of life of Buddhist philosophy.

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Unstill Life, in spite of its serious philosophical underpinning, is not without a sense of humour, whimsical if ironic; the sculpture is animated unlike a more sterile still life, and is dimensional--intended to be viewed in the round. It is certainly useless in a utilitarian sense, but in so being refers to those larger possibilities of ceramics, especially to the human condition.

In My Father's House an assemblage of store-bought functional wares, a tea infuser floats in a cup like a miniature ark, its floodwaters a beverage of shards of other broken cups. The context may be familiar to us; however it is not a cup that we could use anymore, nor a beverage that we could drink. Being without practical importance, its purpose now is to function as a signifier. The wares are placed now beyond the merely functional--and the human presence. The text is a biblical reference to the place waiting for us in heaven, and a reminder of the ritual that once attended the drinking of tea before the advent of the teabag, whether the Japanese Zen tea ceremony or the English afternoon tea.

Nothing apparently could be more valueless or useless than a broken ceramic. Yet to the potter the shard reveals much. So often at an exhibition the potter wishes to pick the piece up and look at its underside. All potters know what to look for--the base will reveal such things such as the honesty of the throwing and the turning, the strength of the foot in the overall form, glaze fluidity and how the glaze performs, thick and thin, the type of body and its inclusions, the amount and type of reduction if any, possible firing temperature and so on.

To the researcher in the field, these are valuable bits of information indeed, and it's quite an impressive list for something discarded. And, while you might get away with touching a contemporary pot, the museum piece will be well and truly out of touch in a display case because it is so precious. But the museum piece is an oddity anyway, priceless because in part it is so rare as, over time, nearly all ceramics by their fragile nature are destined to be broken: the shard is the typical ceramic. Nobody collects these worthless shards (except me). With the shard the relationship between maker and user is no longer, and the original role and purpose in that society's material culture only mutely hinted at, but as forensic evidence much is still revealed to the anthropologist and the potter; in my case the one and the same.

Arvo Tea is an assemblage of ceramics from the 15th to the 20th century is a small jar acting as a base that was thrown by me in 1993. Some of my collected shards are significant, some are just mundane, and some were either made or broken, these materials included a 15th century Thai kiln waster and a shard from cyclone Tracy, so reflecting a broad temporality and universality.

My intent is also to bring the wheel full circle, both in Buddhist (or indeed Christian terms)--to start the life/ceramic cycle from the beginning again where everything is perfect and pristine, yet knowing that pottery's destiny is to be broken and discarded. All things pass: Sic mundi Gloria transit (All the glory of the world passes), or the Pali sutra: Anicca bata sankara (All compounded phenomena is impermanent)--more exotic sounding if slightly more obscure in translation.

Clay's permanence means that everything ever made--shard or not--is still with the planet somewhere. Curiously, handmade ceramics and my useless ceramics, assemblages where function is purposefully denied, fit together again--both fall within the strange and the exotic of Baudrillard's observation--the wheel has come full circle. (12) Both fall outside the functional system--and both are therefore about time and the human condition.

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What of the potter today: ... the curious failure of the potter to colonise the modern kitchen. (13) Or the smith rather than the robot to colonise the automobile assembly line. The whistle of the ploughboy in the lane is heard no more. And what of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor in these post-colonial times? The handmade ceramics' place in the material culture of today is even more marginal than in McCaughey's day. There is a demonstrated lack of demand--look at the drastic decline in student numbers, but pottery reflects accurately today's relationship between people and their objects, and not vice versa. My work may mourn a loss of meaning and value in much of our material culture, not necessarily just the so-called consumer society.

Perhaps with a hint of nostalgia, my work refers to the potential of the ceramic medium. The process of clay, from plastic lump to the kiln is still powerful, and so is what use we may make of it. My work intimates perhaps more important roles for clay than mere function.

In the section about the work of H. R. Hughan, then the most senior of our potters--"the Australian pioneer of stoneware", McCaughey's review was a broad swipe directed at all handmade pottery; "The pretence that pottery possesses an intrinsic honesty unlike the mass-produced submits to no proof ... [it has] marginal status, mock functional and half art ... [it is] an attempt to stay the encroachment of time." (1)

"Archaeologists will judge us on the standard and quality of the mass-produced and regard our pottery as an archaising curiosity." (2)

Norris Ioannou suggested: "In retrospect it is understandable why the art-craft debate emerged [during the '70s] as such a preoccupation of the crafts movement ... motivated essentially by a desire to achieve economic parity." (4)

It was possible, but more demanding of artists to consider much contemporary craft as sculpture. Supposedly without a useful purpose, these objects were not cupboards, teacups, necklaces or dresses and as such had to be assessed as sculptural objects. (5)

"A whole range of objects seems to fall outside the [functional] system: rare, quaint, exotic or bygone objects. They seem to conform to a different order. Yet for all their difference these objects also form part of modernity, and this is also the source of double meaning. The object no longer has any practical importance but exists in order to signify. It has quite a specific function in the framework of system, and what it signifies is time." (8) --Baudrillard.

My work is about the relationship between people and objects; particularly the point where the object breaks and/or is discarded, and so passes from possession to artefact and the human presence is signified by its absence. (9)

Hearn's ceramic sculptures, assemblages and drawings address concepts of functionality, assigned value, and the transitory nature of being. Recent works, the altered production-line ceramics complement the shard as end product and refer to the cyclic nature of life.

My work is about the intrinsic characteristics of clay and the potter's craft, but more importantly it is about my faith, not necessarily Buddhist or Christian, but faith in the future of mankind. Those intrinsic values of clay are hinted at in McCaughey's review: "Beyond mere function, long live useless ceramics".

REFERENCES:

(1.) McCaughey, P: 'The Pottery Bluff', The Age 20/11/1968.

(2.) Ibid.

(3.) Skepsi Gallery, Swanston St. Melbourne, Australia.

(4.) Ioannou, N. 'Cultural Snapshots', Object 1991: 34-36.

(5.) John McPhee, 'Craft Undone', Art Monthly, 2006.

(6.) Review by Webb.

(7.) Art Monthly. March 2006: 14-15.

(8.) Baudrillard 1990:93.

(9.) Ray Hearn, PhD Thesis, 2003.

(10.) Baudrillard op cit.

(11.) Sullivan L. Text panel, Geelong Art Gallery exhibition March, 2006.

(12.) Baudrillard op cit.

(13.) Webb. op cit.

Ray Hearn's career now spans almost 40 years, from his beginnings as a studio potter in 1970 through to a PhD in art and anthropology in 2003 and to the present with his exhibition Shards#4 at Skepsi on Swanston in 2006. This article is an edited version of an interview with Melbourne business writer Gavin Hearn.

The contexts for the issues raised in this paper are two reviews with that same timeframe--McCaughey's 1968 review of the work of H. R. Hughan, the pioneer of Australian stoneware, and Penny Webb's 2005 review of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott's survey of her 50 years as a potter, 1955-2005.