Opening: Thursday 17 June, 5.30-8pm
To be opened by Janet Mansfield, ceramicist, founding editor of Ceramics: Art and Perception and President of the International Academy of Ceramics.

Curated by Joe Pascoe in celebration of Craft Victoria’s 40^th Anniversary
To meet Owen Rye is to meet a man of fine intelligence, cast within a wiry beard, with eyes that are truly alert yet kind. His speech is well tempered but knowing and suggestive of vast experience. Now in his mid sixties, he is correctly accredited with inspiring the continued development of wood-fired ceramics in Australia.

This unsought mantle sits easily with this dedicated maker, for whom the supreme creative process is to place his superbly thrown pots into the anagama kiln where they endure several days of firing. Selected timbers are loaded in the huge worm-like anagama kiln, and for several days and nights a changing group of people attend the kiln, and bond and contribute to the outcome.

In his beautiful mountain ridge property at Boolarra, Gippsland, Owen Rye has established an ideal ceramic centre that functions as studio, timber yard and home. A nearby avenue of old trees runs along the edge, and in the distance the hills roll away. It is both Australian and archetypal in its appeal. The setting carries within it the history of the area, the efforts of Owen Rye and the influence of the pots themselves. Such poetic evocations are necessary, as the endpoint is hard to describe without some prelude.

Deep in the lungs of the kiln, the swirling flames lash at the crouched pots, and their surfaces pickle and pit in the purifying heat. The pots emerge barnacled with ash and riddled with glaze runs, as the natural juices from the timbers bake, burn and ooze over the ceramic forms during the several days of hellish fire.

What comes out could be called uncontrolled, though it is the result of perfect intention.

In the days following the firing, the kiln cools and its contents are garnered and sifted. The silence of the moment extends as each piece is inspected. Glories and failures sit side by side, until a body of satisfactory work is revealed.

The process has just begun.

Over the next few years and decades each ceramic piece will find a special place in a collector’s house or in the artist’s home, and each day and night its form shall quietly change in the light. The moods of the works will alter and eventually a vocabulary of meanings will turn into memories, and the collector will form a relationship with his pot.

Such is the reward of the wood-fired ceramicist.

Artist Statement
All ceramics must be fired. Using wood as a fuel has distinctive consequences. Ash and clay combined at high temperatures create a glaze which is very variable depending on the type of wood and the type of clay and also the placement in the kiln. Consequently every pot is different, unique in its distortions and flaws, its colours and aspect, predicating an attitude where logic is balanced by deviations unintended or impromptu. The final result asks for a sensory response rather than an intellectual one.

This ending needs a sympathetic beginning. In giving clay form on the potter’s wheel I aim at achieving an irregular casual quality, as much as possible just letting it happen with a feeling of playing rather than working, accepting accidents along the way. I aim for an interplay, for tension between the man-made form and the organic or natural fired surface. The best results have a feel of inevitability, when there is no other way it could be. This happens rarely.

I have now explored the aesthetic of this woodfire process for more than thirty years. The exhibition is intended to show markers along the way in this investigation, along with some recent work.

Rye working in the kiln

 

Rye's wood pile

Unfired pots in Rye's studio

Rye's Boolarra house