Rynne Tanton - Interview Summary from Artists & Place

Rynne, it seems that a choice you made at teachers’ college in New Zealand in the 1960s was a very significant one. Tell us about that choice, and about your subsequent career path.

It was one of those accidental sort of things that happen in life. In those days it was a two-year course to be a teacher and you specialised in a couple of subjects. I thought I’d try English, because I really love messing around with words and maybe I’d try Art because I’d never done this strange subject before.

When I went into the studio, the lecturer could see that when I was confronted with a white canvas, I was totally bamboozled. So he took me down to the pottery in the basement where there were two wheels and a kiln and all the rest of it. He gave me a key, and a couple of books, and he said, 'I’m going on long service leave for six months, so you’ve got the room to yourself'. That was a challenge and being a practical person, I just fell into it. By the time he came back there were pots that I’d fired and all the rest of it and I'd started a pottery club at the teachers’ college and so on.

That was just the beginning. I went out teaching, and I used to teach an Adult Education night class in pottery. I decided I wanted to do this in a more professional way, so I needed to go to a higher education learning institution and the closest one was RMIT in Melbourne. So I went from New Zealand to Melbourne and did a 3-year course there. I was going back to New Zealand to teach, but a job came up in Tasmania, and here I still am – 30 years later or whatever it is.

In a television appearance recently, you said that when you are exploring new work, you tend to follow a thematic approach. What are some of the themes that we will see here in your workshop?

I really enjoy dealing with textures so I love messing about with clay. And if you observe how clay acts and reacts – if you go out into the sun and find a pool of clay that’s dried, you can see that it’s cracked. Clay has a certain plasticity; it’ll stretch and bend and all the rest of it and so if you use those qualities in a functional pot, there can be all sorts of permutations and interesting things. One major theme throughout my work is those physical textures, but more recently I have turned to dealing more in a picture plane rather than a three-dimensional tactile surface.

Comparatively recently you’ve expanded your repertoire to exploring crystalline glaze technique. What is that?

The technical term is macrocrystalline glaze and a glaze is made basically of silica, plus a melting agent and a flux. If you put in lots of zinc oxide it can crystallise out if you slow down your cooling cycle in the kiln. You take it up to temperature, melt the glaze, let it drop a little bit, and then hold it for four, five, six or seven hours, and in that time the crystal will grow. So the longer you hold it, the bigger the crystals and so on.

To what extent, then, does technology facilitate your art?

Oh, in so many ways. Having a kiln with a control system on it so that I don’t have to stand by it and turn the kiln up and down is a great use of technology.

In terms of running a business, I’m computer-literate and I love messing about with images. I make point of sale cards with images on them, I do my own labels and all that sort of stuff.

In the workshop I’m always on the look-out for new tools that can create new textures, or help me in any of the processes.

You can’t help but be influenced by the landscape that surrounds your workplace. What is it that you see, and then try to capture in clay and glaze?

I think all of us respond to the landscape in one way or another, especially if you live in the city and you don’t get out into the country much. When you drive out into the country, the raw nature has its own attraction. And when you live in that environment and you see it every day, you get to know it so well.

So at the moment, for example, I’m looking out the door of my workshop at a bush-clad series of hills which work their way up to Mt Arthur. Now I can see a body underneath all that bush. You’ve got a bare peak which is like bones sticking out of the earth. It’s almost as if there are elbows and knees and things pushing out. Then the bush itself is a covering – its clothing. When you look at the bush, you can see all sorts of patterns. You can see the trunks peeping through the different coloured foliage and you can see the white tips of trees which are starting to die. During the course of 24 hours you will see the most amazing changes in colour. So during the bright of day, you’ll see that the peaks of the leaves and the colours are brighter and lighter – yellowy-greens. And then as the sun goes down they’ll change and you’ll get deep shadows, particularly in the valleys between the hills. You’ll see a hill that folds into another gain a shadow and turn a slight blue colour. At night it is absolute magic to see the moon come up behind a eucalyptus tree.

I don’t want to capture it realistically, that’s not what art’s all about. Nature is not art – art is your interpretation of what you’re seeing. I’m seeing colours and textures and shapes and forms, and sometimes I’ll go right to the abstract end of that so that the bush out there could be represented by a vertical stripe with a little bit of texture on it and that would capture the essence of what I’m seeing.

What other places in Tasmania have provided inspiration for you, Rynne?

One of the reasons I live in Tasmania is because I find that if you’re an observant person and you move around too much you can actually get over- stimulated. Some people accuse me of being a stay-at-home because I don’t like moving out of my workshop. Every time I go on a trip up to Stanley or somewhere like that, I find there are things in the environment that just turn me on and I want to put into my pots. I mean, I desperately want to paint as well, and in a way this latest series where I’m doing glaze-on-glaze paintings is a substitute for real painting.

Tell us about the Tessellated Pavement and your visit there.

The Tessellated Pavement series of work was the outcome of going down to Port Arthur and stopping at that natural feature. There’s a signpost which says 'Tessellated Pavement'. I stopped to have a look ‘cause I hadn’t been there for years. And it’s this feature where you have a plateau in the foreshore, which is covered in this rectangular pattern. It’s caused by the tilting of planes of rock, which have since cooled and cracked into patterns. So when I saw these I was really excited because I was just at that stage where I needed to change my work and I was getting more interested in visual patterns on the surface of pots. And so that started me in a whole sequence of using a technique of stencils and spraying through them to give different colour patterns. That’s led on to a whole new series of work with flowers in dishes.

As a lecturer in ceramics you’re teaching, and no doubt inspiring new generations of artists. What advice would you give to an aspiring potter?

Oh, now you’ve used the word 'potter'. And if you talk to people who mess about with clay, you’ll find that there is a distinction between potters and ceramists, or, as some people like to say, ceramicists. A ceramicist is a person who deals with clay and does anything with it: they could be a sculptor, they could be whatever.

A potter is a person who makes functional ware for the table – mugs, jugs, plates, bowls. Now if I was going to give advice to an aspiring potter, it would be that it’s going to be really hard work, and a long road. Unless you’ve got a lot of inspiration and are very focused you won’t make a living at it.

If you were a ceramicist, on the other hand, it’s a different matter, because anything then is grist for the mill. If you want to make figurative work and have nothing to do with function, that’s fine. So, whatever you want to make, it is kosher as a ceramicist. And that’s what’s going on in the universities these days – people are following their noses. They are using any source of inspiration and making anything. And clay is such a versatile medium. If you want to make a chair out of clay you can. If you want to make a bunch of flowers you can. Whatever you want to make out of clay you can, because it’s an incredible material. So the only point I would make is that if you’re a ceramicist and you’re making those sorts of things it’s hard to make a living unless you’re a well-known artist. I mean, our world has got more and more difficult: there are more and more people putting things on the market. There are more and more imports coming into the country. So it’s a luxury market you’re dealing with and it’s a hard road to make a good living.

You have to be aware of all the different market niches, and so one has to develop products to fit into those niches. And whilst you would like to make expensive pieces which have got a good profit margin, sometimes you have to bend a little and make smaller products. Following on the theme of the bush that I do enjoy using, I thought I might do a small product which represents that moon rising past the eucalypts. And so I did a little bowl, which is boxed, and there’s a little story card which goes with it. But I also decided I’d print a few words in the form of a tree visually –it’s doggerel really, and it reads:

The dusty heat of summer’s day
Gives way to the cool of evening.
A rising breeze,
And dancing leaves
Of the eucalypts make patterns on the moon.