Determined potter in old brewery

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32500, 9 January 1971, Page 9

Determined potter in old brewery

(By

KEN COATES

Miners can learn to produce pottery on the West Coast one former Dobson miner hopes to become a full-time potter in 1971—but the woman who has taught him practically all he knows is disheartened because of Government inaction over a national school of pottery.

Miss Yvonne Rust, formerly of Christchurch, who has spent several years on the West Coast teaching and producing her own pottery, says she is fed up at the lack of progress. With adequate supplies of suitable clays, she says, the area is eminently suitable for a national school for potters. “New Zealand needs this; we only make progress in this field because potters have been kind to other people,” she says. “I have been to meetings in Wellington at the Government’s expense after being asked to investigate the complicated business of pottery making and setting up a school. “But all I have been told is not to give up hope,” Miss Rust says. “It really is most discouraging; the students are available, and a girl from Karamea keeps telephoning me regularly.” But it looks as though time and her patience have run out because she says she is leaving the West Coast for Whangarei because she wants to establish her pottery in the North. In May, Miss Rust plans an exhibition in Wellington. “Hard going” In a sense, pottery on the West Coast may well be more vigorous in her absence. An arts and crafts teacher at Greymouth High School during the day, Miss Rust has taken night classes in pottery, and also taught a group of Dobson miners when the coalmine there closed. She says several people have set up kilns, and one miner, Mr Hardy Browning, is turning out good work, and attempting to make a living from pottery. “It’s pretty hard going actually,” said Mr Browning. “I was a miner and at the age of 56 it is rather hard to pick up new things—the trouble is to learn the chemistry of the glazes and the physics of what happens in the kiln. I .only had a sixth standard education.”

But the. former miner, who has his own kiln, said he wanted to “give it a go” full time during the coming year. “I cannot really meet the demand—from Christchurch, Oamaru, Ashburton and other centres,” he says. Mr Browning said initially Miss Rust taught four miners in a “crash” course, but he was the only one still going.

Centre for West Coast people interested in pottery, and a number of potters from all over New Zealand, has been an abandoned cofrugated-iron • brewery on the northern bank of the Grey River.

From the northern highway into Greymouth, the average motorist would hardly give the place a second glance. When I climbed the rough track to the old building on two levels I found Miss Rust in residence.

By anyone’s standards she was roughing it there among the pottery awaiting firing and two brick kilns, one oil fired, the other a voracious eater of coal. But Yvonne Rust is an artist who obviously does not much care about housekeeping in the conventional sense. She was much more interested in showing me her students’ pottery ready for the kiln. When school finished, Miss Rust, the 1 teacher, became the dedicated , potter, and moved into the former brewery.

“What would you like to drink—tea, beer . . . some red wine?” she asked producing a flagon of wine. I settled for a large pottery mug almost brimming with red wine. Miss Rust, sitting beside a pot-bellied coal stove, explained how she felt about the old brewery: “It is a very inspiring place,” she said. “New Zealand potter Barry Brickell and others have been quite inspired here; you can’t see out, because there are no windows, and that is a good thing really—you must concentrate on creating. It’s quite fantastic.” She recalls that when she took over the building, “there was a huge vat thing in the middle with pipes everywhere, and an inch of water running through the place.” Apparently, before the necessary relay equipment was installed, it was the only place in Greymouth where television could be watched, “and they all used to sit up here and watch it,” she said. Miss Rust admits to always having had a hankering for the place and says it has had a similar appeal to other potters. Two from Auckland had just returned, she said. The D.S.I.R.- had pinpointed all the areas where suitable clays were found and there was plenty of raw material for a thriving pottery industry on the West Coast. It would be an ideal location for a national pottery school. Sleeping in the old building alone does not worry Miss Rust, and she cooks on an electric frying pan. Her main concern is to get on with her pottery in time for her exhibition —and she can best do this living be-

side the kilns. Anyway, she adds, she has plenty of visitors, including a fine arts graduate from Canterbury who lives just up the road, and is working with bone. Wrong atmosphere As to what sort of pottery she likes best, Miss Rust says she makes few ordinary things. She produced a spice tree—a kind of “sculpture of the kitchen” for various spices. Wine pots, casseroles, lampbases, dinner sets and garden water-falls are also made, but she admits that ecclesiastical objects are her favourites. “I am making this chalice for some nuns,” she explained. Miss Rust, an outspoken woman, has some definite opinions of West Coast people’s attitudes towards art. It’s unfortunate, she says, that anyone interested in art, or who has artistic ability, is looked on as rather queer. And in this climate, the artistic temperament can only survive for a limited period. “A number of New Zealand artists come here thinking it will be wonderful—and the surroundings certainly have grandeur and are stimulating, but the atmosphere is the problem, and they all have to go.” In Greymouth, a small shop has been opened to sell locally made pottery and other handicraft goods. Judging by what I saw there, anything done to foster the development of pottery on the West Coast would be well worth while, and what has been achieved so far says a great deal for a creative woman of determination and industry.