They call it terroir in France. Notoriously difficult to translate, the term describes the unique interplay of a place’s geology, terrain and climate that shapes the wine and food produced there. Terroir evokes myths – the magic and elusive ingredients that imbue a place with something special but undefinable – and is uncannily apposite for the new body of ceramic works developed by Kelly Austin in response to context, history and land. Austin has incorporated local materials into these new works in a manner that makes them uniquely Tasmanian.
There is a romance to the idea of working only with local materials to connect works to place. This idea was enshrined in the ceramic world through The Potter’s Book (1940) by Bernard Leach, the ‘grandfather’ of studio pottery. His ideals of ‘truth to materials’ valorised the humble surface of fired clay from the local area. Austin herself describes her approach to the incorporation of local elements as somewhat ‘Leachian’. 1 But Austin’s approach is more complex, and she is interested in combining local and unrefined materials with non-local and refined materials (often industrially produced) – a heresy that Leach would never have countenanced. Austin’s attraction to this approach is that:
Their dialogue sparks an energy/composition with dynamism and contradiction. Their differences often enhance one another’s strengths. A pink, mason-stained (industrially produced ‘colour’) glaze next to a crunchy dolerite-infused dark clay body. This is the way we live and the world we live in; a
