Greg Daly : Information Gallery

AN ILLUSTRIOUS PASSION

Craft Arts International No 54, 2002.

The ceramic art of Greg Daly continues to attract accolades from around the world, but the work of this Australian potter is not behoved on any particular fashionable style or genre.

Text by Gordon Foulds. Photography by Russel Baader.

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From the time Greg Daly chose to study pottery in year 8 at his Melbourne high school, he knew that he had found his life's vocation. The subject choice was Latin, German or Pottery. He sums it up by saying 'No contest'; and from the beginning it was a wonderful voyage of discovery and learning. While still at high school he worked part-time from the age of 13 in a ceramic supply shop where he handled a full range of clays and glazes, and was periodically involved in the building of kilns. Skills he learned at that time have underpinned all that he has accomplished since. Daly's first teacher, obviously aware of his young student's enormous potential, took him to view many important exhibitions, sensitising him to ceramics as a vocation.

By the time he left school he had attended numerous workshops and lectures, and had met many of the most important ceramists of the day, including Harold Hughan, Peter Rushforth, Paul Soldner and Reg Preston, which he likens to teenagers of today meeting many of their pop idols. He says that they all had honesty, sincerity and integrity, but above all, they had a great passion for their work, which the young Daly set as a benchmark for himself. By the time he left school he had already seen many exhibitions at that icon of ceramics, the Melbourne Craft Centre, and was totally confirmed in his choice of ceramics for further study.

He enrolled at RMIT gaining first a Diploma of Art followed by a Fellowship Diploma. The head of the department at that time was Jack Knight, who was in his last years at RMIT but made a lasting impression on his young student. 'Jack possessed incredible throwing skills, but he left you to get on with it. You were required to develop self-discipline,' says Daly. He remembers the 1970s as being a 'very heady time with lots of energy evident, and people taking up new initiatives and running with them. We saw the begin-ning of the Victorian Ceramic Group, and then the Craft Association of Victoria, which later became the Craft Council'. Daly was involved at an early stage with all of these initiatives and has always been quick to involve himself in organisations that support and promote both ceramics and the arts. He was involved with the establishment of NAVA, the National Asso-ciation of Visual Arts, in 1986, served on the board of the Craft Council of Australia (now Craft Australia) for five years and was its President for two years. He feels it is part of his responsibility to provide support and opportunity for the continuing development of the crafts wherever possible, although hc says that his own career has often been neglected as a result, but does not in any way resent this.

He decided early in his career that his interest lay in making exhibition pieces rather than production lines. He has considerable appreciation of the skills of production potters even though he has had no experience in this field himself. Because of this early choice, he has now mounted in excess of 70 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 150 group exhibitions in Japan, Lithuania, the UK, Canada, France, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Korea, Taiwan, the USA, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Poland, New Zealand and in all States of Australia.

Daly refers to his work mode as 'working on the edge'. He does not do test pieces, but works directly with and on the work destined for exhibitions, saying that in this way he finds a special flow with the work and its development. This means, of course, that he is usually out of his comfort zone, and must be strongly disciplined at all times. His focus, too, is different than it would have been if he had just made production pots every day. Working in this way, he finds that things happen which cause him exclaim, 'Wow! That's where I want to go' But adds, 'I must be careful not to respond too quickly and miss fully developing these serendipitous aspects of the work along the way.'

Always a lateral thinker, Daly now has such a large body of work behind him that he has no hesitation in going back to past work and using from it whatever suits him at the time. He views this as having all the work in a circle and says he has no qualms in unconsciously going backwards or moving freely within this circle, selecting elements from earlier periods. He calls this "re-mining" his past. He is now using gold leaf again after not having used it for eight years. He was missing the quality of finish that gold and silver leaf give when fired on a glazed surface. He had previously used it for 12 years, along with the lustres for which he has become renowned. And although he is not currently using lustres, he says that he will return to the lustred surface.

Regarding the different aspects of his work, he says none is more important than any other. 'The form, the glaze, the decoration and the way they work together, they all hold equal importance. It's the whole thing. Harmony and the dynamics of a piece will determine the way I decorate.' However, Daly has never thought of himself solely as a decorator and is very surprised if others see him this way. He maintains that decoration has only ever been a part of the pot and should work towards a balanced whole.

When discussing Daly's work, one can only speak in absolute superlatives. This 21 st-century alchemist performs totally magical feats with earth and fire. He is a master thrower who makes anything from the tiniest of forms to pieces up to one metre tall. He works in a range of traditional forms, through to thrown and altered, and sculptural pieces. He is highly skilled in the use of a full spectrum of glazes, resists, lustres, etches, gold and silver leaf and enamels, and at every exhibition produces ever more compelling pieces. His decoration has ranged through low-keyed beauty to the dramatic effects of pure coloured glaze-on-glaze, through to the dreamy opulence of silver and gold leaf and the languorous depth of illusory spectral images sensed through the surfaces of his lustred forms. The enamel lines on these latter surfaces seem, at times, to suggest the darting flight of some exotic bird, and at other times rare and beautiful flowers, or even the calligraphy of some long-lost language.

'Sometimes I like to do quite extravagant things, just to tease the viewer and make them react.' An example of this is the purple forms he made during the mid-' 7Os, but then discovered that the intense purple-satin colour existed in nature, in the brilliantly coloured Paterson's curse, or Salvation Jane. Daly says that his lime greens and oranges may also provoke a strong reaction from the viewer. He enjoys all glazes, but he believes that lustred surfaces create superb illusions. 'Multiple layers of glazes, when fired, can give wonderful effects, like looking into water. The colours change as one walks around the pot; light changes the piece. I see such astonishing illusions of surface with lustres; they have intangible colours and shimmering effects.' When living in Melbourne he liked looking at the Rialto Towers throughout the day, because they appeared to change colour, rather like Monet's hay-stacks. 'If I only had two elements to work with, my choice would be light and water. Water is constantly changing colour owing to the way it absorbs, refracts and reflects light.'

Daly has always been an admirer and collector of other ceramists' work and has amassed a collection of over 500 pieces, ranging from the ancient Chinese Sung Dynasty through to the most contemporary of current work. But although he enjoys them and what they have to offer him spiritually, he does not seek to make pieces like them. He follows his own creative spirit. However, it is becoming harder to find a niche in the market for the special one-off works, and he says that many of his peers are also experiencing this problem. He has noticed a distinct change occurring in the marketplace right now, and although it is at times difficult to work out why, perhaps it is because older buyers are retiring and probably already have all the pieces they want. 'The younger buyers are not interested in ceramics. They want a lifestyle of "this goes with that" and self-indulgent pieces that fit into the new style living. The next generation are not interested in acquiring these quality pieces as they did in the past, and although there are some excellent craft galleries now, they are fewer in number.' As a result of these trends, Daly is now accepting more corporate commissions.

Commissions have been a bete noire for many artists, but Daly says that he is now doing quite a lot of them and finding the whole field both interesting, reward-ing and challenging. Many artists have avoided them because the clients may have found that the commissioned works have failed to meet their expectations. It is rather like a game in which the client expects the artist to come up with a piece like the image that he, the client, has in his head, and often leads to frustra-tion for the artist and disappointment for the client. Daly has dealt with the problem by engaging in a considerable degree of negotiation with the client, and has had major input into the final outcomes. He has been able, through discussion, to show the client that other shapes and colours may indeed be more appro-priate than the client's original concepts, and submits suggestions and pieces in the way that a sculptor might make a maquette. This is proving to be a positive and rewarding experience for both the artist and his clients. Until fairly recently, Daly has never made production line cups, saucers and plates, but now having done so for a local restaurant, has decided that he thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Daly finds inspiration in nature, but not in a direct way, so that he has not translated images from nature onto the surfaces of his work. Instead, it has worked in a more indirect way, 'a kind of osmosis'. Since he has lived in Cowra, NSW he has found the colours of that part of the country slowly emerging in his work. He has particularly responded to the different colours of gumleaves, the lovely greys, greens and pinks, all colours for which he has a strong empathy. He finds that these colours are appearing in his work in most subtle ways. He also enjoys the buttercup yellow of the vast fields of canola that grow in his area, and these colours too are beginning to find their way onto the surfaces of his pots. Sometimes he finds that a small section of a piece is so interesting that he will develop that small piece into a further work, and may even repeat the process again from that previous develop-ment, taking his work into further dimensions.

Early influences from his life in Melbourne still resonate through Daly's work. He grew up surrounded by lines: the tram lines, the electric wires that supply the trams with their power, the ubiquitous powerlines that run up and down every suburban street, and the wire fences of the suburbs. All of which often found their way into the fast-moving lines of his lustres. Daly also enjoys the bird's-eye view of the landscape that is to be seen when enjoymg the vast panoramas from a mountain top, or when travelling by plane. The patterns in rocks, the folding of colour in stone and the stratified hues found in mountain ranges and in road cuttings through hills, have also influenced his work at various times and in various ways.

When asked what makes a good pot, he replies that the negative space surrounding it is probably the thing that will most make that pot work. 'When viewing a pot I always look at the negative space, especially the space around the shoulder, the rim and the lip. Where does the eye settle? These are the features that create the movement, the energy and the tension on the surface. ' He says that many people don't know how to look at a pot properly. They may see only the decoration, but the decoration must work with the form in order to create the surface movement and the tension. If the decoration is overdone or too evenly spaced, it renders the piece static. Decoration need only be the placement of one glaze over another. Further to this subject of seeing and knowing, he quotes: 'The ones who see the invisible can do the impossible'; and from The Little Prince by Saint Exupery, he quotes: 'It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.' And for himself, he adds: 'The most important thing I have to work with is my intuition. There are no rules... I just do it.'

Like many things throughout all art disciplines, what makes a process work is the passion. At the conclusion of a workshop, Daly often says to the students: 'I'm now giving you permission to go home and play.' He believes that when we lose that essence, the work just becomes heavy and dead.

According to Daly, his exhibition at Quadrivium in 2000 represented an enjoyable and satisfying body of work that contained some pieces which unabashedly echoed work from an earlier period, some 20 or more years before, a number of which are illustrated in this article. Although he had worked these shapes and forms before, on this occasion he added tripod feet to some of them, making them sit differentlv in space. He combined lime green and orange, which he had never previously used, and really enjoyed the result. 'At first I rejected it,' he says, and so it sat unused in a cupboard for 15 years. He only expected ever to use it again as a liner with black, and admitted that even though the work in the Quadrivium show seemed to engage a different tangent, its evolution had begun 12 months earlier. Altbough Daly was not consciously revisiting earlier times, he felt quite free to play with what was already there. 'I've always felt comfortable with my work. I haven't looked back and thought that anything was awful.'

Daly's career has been spectacularly successful and is a wonderful example to all young ceramists of what is possible. His work has been collected by most Australian State galleries and many regional galleries. He has works in numerous overseas collections, including those of major galleries in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Croatia, Lithuania, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and New Zealand. In addition to receiving many prestigious awards in Australia and overseas, he has also lectured and run workshops throughout the world, presented papers at numerous conferences, and had many articles published internationally. His professional career has been trulv international. He has lectured at several tertiary institutions and is an examiner for some of these. Currently he lectures part-time at the Canberra School of Art and Australian National University. He belongs to a number of craft organisations and is one of the few Australian members of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva.

Now a distinguished mid-career artist, it is difficult to foretell where Greg Daly's future might take him next. He already seems to have been everywhere. Suffice it to say, however, that we can confidently predict that his future work will continue to delight us all and enrich the tradition of contemporary studio ceramics within Australia and internationally.

Gordon Foulds

A 25-year survey exhibition of Greg Daly's work will be held at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW in October, 2002. For further information visit www.gregdaly. com

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