The New Dark Ages and Dirty Little Secrets

In this age where everything is a cheap import from China and nothing has any real value anymore, where every foreigner coming here is a potential terrorist, our politicians have terrorised us into sacrificing some of our hard fought for rights and freedoms, and we seem happy to meekly sign them away as long as interest rates stay low and we can have lots of cheap plastic junk. 1 believe that we are entering the new dark ages where humanism, education and the rule of science are being eroded, to be replaced with the new voodoo, ignorance and superstition.

I have been interested for some time with aspects of the real, the tangible, the hand made, a sense of place, the 'terroir' of a locality. 1 have no interest in the fast track and the cheap throwaway. I want real things around me, things that will stay around me and develop a patina of age and a meaning born of context and familiarity.

The work in this current exhibition is the result of this approach and the last two years' research. It follows my last show here of local porcelains. This new work is dark and not made from clay in the normal sense. The material is an interesting mixture of decomposing basic igneous rock fragments and dirt that 1 collect locally. This 'clay-like' unusual stuff does not respond to normal clay working procedures. It tested me and defeated me for some time, but as Giacometti once said, "every failure is one step closer to success."

I found some similarities with the ancient Song dynasty Ge ware. As this has been an interest of mine for many years, 1 found the opportunity irresistible. Ge ware was produced exclusively for royalty. And uncannily, the first piece of this work that 1 produced was as a gift for a King. Here the similarities end and the romantic associations begin. The Song dynasty potters spent centuries developing and perfecting this very difficult technique. 1 have the benefit of modern technology to speed the process and have condensed the exercise down to two years.

Some of the subtle quality of the Ge wares was due to the use of a friable black clay body and the application of an unrelated pale felspathic glaze fluxed with slaked quick lime.

This strange dirt is composed almost entirely of equal parts of silica, alumina and iron oxide. 1 have taken the Chinese references above (and these are the only Chinese imp" in the show) and developed a series of works that reflect this venerable and ancient tradition. There are references to the traditions of the tenmoku bowl, which has been an enduring preoccupation of mine, the Song Guan bowl, Longguan celadons as well as the work of the late lvan McMeekin.

In the Pacific region there is a term 'mana' with some currency that describes a power that can reside in objects. This power is created in the object at the time of its creation by the maker, sometimes it is bestowed on the object by an observer, and at other times it is passed into the object by association.

Not all makers create objects with mana and not all objects made by a particular maker are imbued with mana, but when these two circumstances coincide the result is powerful.

When an object charged with mana by its maker is passed to another, the mana is passed along with it and empowers the receiver.

I don't believe that this power in an object is so much like magic, as 1 am of the post industrial age, but rather, it is more akin to a sense of wonder in the beauty of some particularly special object that enriches the lives of those that are able to appreciate it both in its making and in its use. These works are the dirty little secrets of the Southern Highlands and 1 believe that 1 have imbued some degree of mana into them.

Steve Harrison 2006