Raku pottery won unexpected acclaim

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 6

Raku pottery won unexpected acclaim

An Australian potter who disregarded well-meant advice that she postpone her career until her children had grown up has since won international acclaim, and an M.8.E., for her services to pottery.

Mrs Joan Campbell, of Fremantle, Western Australia, arrived in Christchurch this week to present public lectures and hold workshops in raku techniques: the art of fast-fired pottery. She developed her craft by exploiting to the full the little time and the resources at her disposal. She collected wood to fire the kin from the nearby bush, and dug clay from the sandy soil of Fremantle. She is a selftaught potter, and chose the medium that. was to bring her international recognition almost by chance eight years ago.

Initially she used raku firing only as a means of testing kilns which she was building for other people. But she was captivated by the pots’ transformation and curious that the apparently crude little bowls she produced could have fascinated the Japanese who developed raku techniques 800 years 'ago. 1 Several months passed be- ■ fore Mrs Campbell dis!covered the secret in a little igrey pot which was a ■“lovely, soft, gentle thing.”

I “It had a quality of life ) about it, a character, and I [knew it was possible to get pots of quality in simpler, less self-conscious, more honest ways than the more conventional techniques,” she said.

She spent a year making these pots and developing the form. By the end of 1969 her garden was full of pots, but she had no idea whether they were good or [bad. Her pottery surprised the local art gallery, but its surprise was greater when it displayed the pots and all were sold in 20 minutes. Mrs Campbell exhibited jher raku work for the next [five years and in 1972 won I an international award and a special grant from the Australian Council for the Arts which enabled her to study in the United States. She has since worked in Papua New

{Guinea, Scotland, and Switzerland. In Fremantle she runs a workshop for young people, providing all the resources herself. “You don’t work for yourself: you work for the next generation,” she said.

The Australian attitudes to art had changed greatly in the last five years. One of hei young potters is a fire|man whose work mates turn

up at the studio to encourage him and buy his pottery. “That’s a tremendous breakthrough which would not have happened five years ago.”

She is looking forward to holding workshops in Christchurch because she was interested to discover the reason for New Zealand’s comparatively large population of potters.