Les Blakebrough's
SOUTHERN ICE PORCELAIN

article by Peter Lane (UK)

I have long searched for a reliable porcelain body that offers, intensely pure whiteness allied to translucency and good throwing qualities. Most commercially available porcelains tend to appear off-white, or even slightly grey, due to contamination by iron or other impurities. I have thrown vessel forms using many different porcelains since 1970. Most of these can lay claim to plasticity, strength and some degree of translucency but none come remotely close to the perfect whiteness of a new body produced by Clayworks in Victoria, Australia.

'Southern Ice' is, without doubt, the most exciting porcelain body I have ever used. Quite large pieces can be made due to its excellent throwing properties. It offers also a uniquely cool and brilliant whiteness that responds extremely well to the application of air-brushed underglaze pigments high-fired in my electric kiln. But its most attractive quality for me is the various degrees of translucency achieved by sponging back when bone dry through successive layers of painted resists (I use an acrylic medium) left unglazed and fired to 1280 degrees centigrade or more in reduction.

This porcelain is the result of many experiments conducted over a period of several years by Les Blakebrough working at the Centre for the Arts, Hobart University. In 1993, Les won a Churchill Research Fellowship to study in industry. This enabled him to spend time at the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain factory in Denmark; Arabia in Finland and at Royal Worcester Porcelain in England. The experience gave him "a much broader insight into an industrial aesthetic" that led to his subsequent work on the composition of porcelains using materials from Australia and New Zealand.

The aim was to produce a body that would be beautiful, translucent and whiter unglazed than existing porcelains. Les described to me how the work developed over six or seven years:

"We began getting good results with the resist process, achieving numerous wall thicknesses to reveal the translucent qualities in the material. Experiments with metallic salts were also done, following on from the work of Arne Ase in Norway during the 1980s. The great benefit in this was to use colour but to keep the surface pristine and unglazed.

Gradually our clay became better than any others to which we had access. It was whiter, more translucent and it even worked better, especially in the raw state. We had it casting well and the plastic body could be kneeded which is almost impossible with some others. We could put it through a de-airing pug mill - sure test of plastic qualities. By 1998 my clay was behaving so well in most aspects of making, throwing, and casting that it was set for commercial production."