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IN JULY, 1993, I VISITED GREG DALY'S PLACE NEAR COWRA IN CENTRAL NSW. I was looking forward to this as I had not been to his studio since 1983 when he was living in inner city Melbourne with little working and storage space. After a couple of hours drive from Orange, I found Daly in quite a different situation and one, to my mind, near idyllic among some of the most pleasant gently undulating country in the State. Daly has converted a large outbuilding into a studio and the chirruping of small birds was a soothing replacement of the rattle of a Fitzroy tram. With typical planning and generosity, Daly had laid out the entire chronology of his work through selected examples down a long bench that ran half the length of his studio. The years and his young familv had not changed the man at all. His charm and consideration was still the same and he was just as busy making works for national and international exhibitions as he has done since 1974, when a student at RMIT. In addition, he is an indefatigable traveller, chairing meetings, judging exhibitions, talking and giving workshops. He has always been generous with his knowledge and is refreshing to talk to about art because he is totally and mercifully free of jargon and pretension. That is not to say his work is devoid of multiple layers of meaning for the work I saw, although different in formal and decorative concerns, revealed depth and a remarkable consistency that I think is the result of Daly's methodical scientific approach to his work.  | I say 'science' rather than the fashionable 'alchemy', for although Daly shares many of the mystical inclinations of other ceramists, there is nothing hit or miss about him and his work. He may be a ceaseless experimenter but his experiments are run inder strict controls where the variables are allowed only so much distance from his copious knowledge of ceramics, glazing and pigment behaviour. Although he is fond of quoting from works such as the Tao te Ching, and describes his own working discoveries as a path to self-realisation, his approach is not to withdraw from the world as a delusory source but to examine it all the harder, on the macro and the micro scales, so as to progress and grow. Daly could be described as a rigorous empiricist, and yet, for him, a new effect gained from his favourite glaze is an important enlargement of his experience that can sometimes lead to a corresponding spiritual epiphany. |
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From the beginning of his interest in ceramics in his school days, he sought to master a relatively small range of skills and effects and to move on from one interest to another as what he now describes as 'variable stretching' revealed a new range of possibilities. One of his anthropomorphic forms of the 1980s - globulating upwards from an impossibly small foot - would not seem to bear much resemblance to his more recent glossy and gilded patterns, yet a consistent interest in space, both as formal structure and as cosmic actuality, has helped to give his work over the years a recognisable similarity and levels of meaning not often found in ceramics.
Interest in the flow of space, in its containing power, in its essentiality, is common to most potters who are, of course, locked into space as the Kantian medium for the occurance of form, but few others have expanded their investigations to the depictions of outer space, gold leaf galaxies, whirling dust clouds; few also are they who can derive a decorative schema of glazes which change both apparent colour and form with the viewers' movement - in deliberate reminder of the essential relativity of all objects in the space time continuum.
Greg Daly has from the beginning developed one interest directly from another. If he discovered a glaze effect that resembles and came about from observing a pattern of branches against a Melbourne sky, Daly's experimental method, which he calls, "playing with areas I like", will focus down on an effect that may even have derived from chance - and he will seek to replicate this effect so as to be able to reproduce it on any scale he likes. |  |
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| Because he works with only five or six different glazes in each of his distinctive decorative styles - lustre glaze, pastel matt as in the early forms, crackle glazes, acid etched glazes and those that work well with gold leaf or resist decoration - he is able to keep a tight rein on chance happenings and can nearly always duplicate the effect. He says this is what he means by being true to his materials. Although he has not worked in a markedly Japan-influenced style since student days, and there is certainly little of Bernard Leach evident in a Greg Daly piece, he retains a strong affinity for the truth to materials ideas that abounded in his youth.
He says he was strongly influenced by Reg Preston's fascination with glazes. His early pieces were all reduced, but now he oxidises deliberately unevenly, with some local reduction, and will go over-the-top in glaze on glaze application to a thickness where students will just not believe that it can be successfully fired. |
Daly claims he is being true to, and revealing of, the nature of his mateials - of the metals in his lustres, of the ceramic body that can accept his forms, his deco-ration, h is glazes. The fact that others can imitate his work is proof of this essential truth to materials, although he has never kept any of his discoveries secret; on the contrary, he is faultlessly generous with his knowledge.
Before we began talking about his work, he showed me his collection of other potter's work. I saw a couple of hundred pieces, many of museum quality, that represented an alphabet of the famous potters of this country and of England and Japan. I thought some of his selections were quite idiosyncratic in that he had chosen works that were more about glaze and decoration than perhaps the maker was generally regarded for. He showed me for instance, a Harold Hughan lilac design platter but did not produce one of Hughan's celadon's, which I assume he had some-where among the packed shelves. He explained that what he had found in common among these pieces, was "the intangible essence of the maker". In his collection, each work is as much "the maker's own signature as his heart beat". This is certainlv an admirable, if difficult, curatorial premise on which to base a collection but Daly seems to have chosen well. He has known many of the makers and can well assess the degree of expressivity in the work and make a judgment as to the authenticity of their signatures. |  |
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I wonder though, just what he means by the maker's 'essence'. lt is true that I have always been able to identify a piece by Daly - his signature is clear, yet the maker seems veiled beneath the floating films of glaze. We discover little of Daly's personality other than his evident discipline, his understanding of the beautiful and the methodical approach that has given him his remarkable consistency over the years. This is, of course, quite a lot to discover, but I guess that like Tolstoy after he made his aesthetic statements in What is Art Daly would have to disqualify most of his own works from his collection - for we do not, I think, discover the man in his work. His work is to my eye not expressive of the emotions of the man, of his nature. Rather, we see the results of a singular idea of beauty and the disciplined creation of that idea. His personality is further submerged in the work because his idea of the beautiful is intimately linked with his long term interest in archaeology, geology and astronomy. | | These branches of science have interested Daly since his school days and his interest is evident in most of his work. He is indeed lucky to have chosen to work in the field of ceramics which contains these sciences like no other. Daly is conscious of time in the making of his work, both the efficiency time and motion ticking of the clock, and time in the archaeological scale. He knows that ceramic is the most durable of media, is aware that a fine piece will move viewers centuries in the future. He gets so involved in the making that he can remember the time and place, the conditions of each piece he has made. However, he never seeks to copy a style of the past but to create a new piece that will reflect a sense of the timeless as does a beautiful vessel, glaze intact, recovered from an ancient tomb. What he is after is to make ceramics that make their own statement in the infinite chain of fine work.
I saw in the 20 years of his life spread on the bench, a creative energy that had come into being more like the result of experimental method than an ecstatic descent of the Muse. It was clear that his work is a definite 'Quest', but it seemed more like the quest of a nuclear physicist than a romantic. At one point in our conversation he quoted Einstein, a good quote which I have forgotten, but it was the mystical creative Einstein, he who said of quantum mechanics, "God does not play dice".
Daly stresses his own holistic approach. "The form must be right, the glaze has to be right, the decoration, the marriage of the whole. I think it is important... people may see the decoration first, but what sup-ports that decoration?" He says this rather in an Einsteinian spirit, the spirit of "the field is the only reality" where all phenomena are vitally interconnected. He referred to his holistic approach a few times in our talk and says that many potters allow one aspect of the work too much prominence and the work loses its balance. Alan Sisley Alan Sisley is the Director of the Orange Regional Gallery, NSW.
An exhibition of the work of Greg Daly will be held from September 1-30, 1993
at the Ceramic Art Gallery, 33 William Street, Paddington, Sydney, NSW. |
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