Porcelain: combining fragility with strength

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 24

Porcelain: combining fragility with strength

The traditional paleness of porcelain is enlivened with glazes of deepest blue and dark red in an exhibiton of recent work by the Christchurch potter David Brokenshire at the Gefn Craft Co-operative in the Cashel Street mall. Brokenshire describes the collection of bowls as very simple and understated. “They’re largely concerned with a series of dark glazes that I’ve been working on,” he says. “There’s a new blue — a brilliant ultramarine — and a brick red that’s relatively new. They’re grouped in series of three or five pieces.” Porcelain is the pottery on which Brokenshire has built his considerable reputation. He has developed a love-hate relationship with it. “It’s crazy material,” he says, “but you can really get hooked on it. It’s not a found clay like the others — you can’t just dig it out of the ground. It’s half china clay, which is very white and has a high firing, and half feldspar and quartz, which are_ glass-making materials. • They soften the china clay and give some of the qualities of glass and some of clay to produce a lovely translucency — if you can get it thin enough.”

The raw material is very “short” in potters’ terms — almost non-plas-tic. If it is thrown on the wheel, the potter has to do a great deal of turning to get it thin enough to produce the desired translucency.

Brokenshire has developed a collection of biscuited moulds in which he can squeeze the clay to

incredible thinness so that when it is glazed and fired, the light conies through. The moulds are very porous and as the clay hardens in the supporting mould, it shrinks away and is easily removed. Brokenshire began working in clay as a release from the tensions of his previous profesison of

architecture, and 20 years later made it his full time occupation. He was attracted to porcelain 14 years ago because of its apparent fragility — while in fact it is quite strong — and its incredible durability. He has a little Ming dynasty porcelain bowl (made about the time of Elizabeth I) which he points out could easily

last for ever. Porcelain’s translucency is of course its distinctive feature. “It takes colour superbly well,” he says. “It’s like watercolour paper, where you’ve got the whiteness behind the actual piece. The edges can be made so thin that you can see through it. “It’s an infuriating material. It falls over in the kiln, but at its best it has a purity and almost an interior light. You get hooked on it. It’s terrifying though. Out of every 100 pieces I make, I get only 40 to sell. I make the most expensive hard-fill in Christchurch.”

Porcelain can fail at any stage of the process. It can warp out of shape while it is drying. “It’s incredibly fragile at that stage. You can almost breathe on it and the damned stuff will fall apart.” And during firing it can fall over or stick to the walls of the kiln. Porcelain’s drawback is that it is not really suitable for pots of large size. Brokenshire has made porcelain pieces up to 10 inches high, but now he is making large moulds up to 16 inches tall in which he hopes to make big pots with a “wind” theme for an overseas exhibition.