Maker Profiles: John Tuckwell

John Tuckwell Porcelain

Australian Design Centre, 22 November 2024 – 19 February 2025

John Tuckwell has been a potter for more than 30 years. Based in Bellingen, Northern NSW, he is renowned for his elegant, highly technical work using coloured slabs made from liquid white porcelain. He is also a respected teacher.

In 2020 John suffered a major stroke that changed his life and art practice. Unable to continue working in the same way, he went back into the studio to discover what was possible with reduced physical and cognitive capacity.

After a year of persevering, John entered a new phase of his intense relationship to porcelain. The work he produces now looks quite different to his previous more streamlined constructions, with a stylistic edge.

ADC spoke to John and his partner Gloria Malone, who have shared a studio for 20 years at their home.

John: You're speaking to a disabled person. About four or five years ago I had a stroke which changed things around for me. All the pieces showing at ADC are made since the stroke.

Gloria: I'm a potter and I love more functional work. I do a lot of table work.

John: I started with porcelain about 22 years ago and that’s pretty much all I’ve done. Occasionally I make something out of something out of brown clay, just for fun. I use Clean Lumina porcelain, which is the whitest, most translucent porcelain I can find.

I'd been potting for about 10 years or so when Gloria threw me out of the house and said you need to study. So I went to ANU and did their Distance Diploma over four or five years, which was amazing. Porcelain had a strong representation among the international tutors at ANU. That is where I fell in love with porcelain and what could be achieved with it. I came home and discarded my brown earthenware clay forever more.

How did your practice change after the stroke?

I could no longer physically make things like I used to. At the start I thought maybe it's the end of my art practice, it might be just for fun now. But I thought about it for a while and changed things around so what I'm doing now is achievable.

How long did it take to get back to it after the stroke?

I could make small, ugly things a couple of months later, but it took about a year to make large, thoughtful works again.

Was it relearning the craft in a way?

Gloria: There was a bit of relearning going on because he could physically put A to B, but they didn't have the same artistic merit. And that had to come back too, apart from the physicality of making the pot.

John: I went down the workshop one day and said to Gloria, I think I'll stop teaching now - I used to do a lot of workshops. And she said, ‘Yeah, that's fine.’ And then I said, maybe I'll stop making everything. She said, ‘What else will you do?’ I was struck with that thinking. So initially I was making things for fun, then slowly but surely the quality returned, with the same concept behind them.

Gloria, when did you look at his work and think, oh, you're there?

Gloria: It was a subtle change. I think we looked at his early work post-stroke, and said, oh yeah, that's pretty ugly. It probably took John a year to get back to something he wouldn't be embarrassed about showing outside the studio. It was a long process, brains take such a long time to recover.

Was it good therapy?

John: Yes, having a workshop to go to was the best thing.

Gloria: It was the best thing for you artistically, physically and mentally, we are very fortunate to have a studio at home. But there must have been a lot of knowledge and muscle memory in there too. It took that time to wake up again, apart from learning the new techniques.

John: Pre-stroke I was able to manage large slip slabs of around 400 x 300 mm. These were created on the flat plaster slab by layering up coloured slip. After the stroke one hand had the shakes so I had trouble holding the larger pieces. I had to be happy with relatively small things. I think I might be capable of working with big slabs again now, but I'm not sure I want to.

These new works look more fragile but you say they are in fact very strong?

I had a pot I'd been looking at for a couple of years, reasonably large, about 400 mm tall. There was something I wasn't happy with, a broken bit I couldn't fix. So finally I took it outside behind the studio and said, ‘You've got to go!’ and threw it. And it bounced! It took a couple more throws but I finally smashed it. We have a designated space exactly for that purpose!

Gloria: Sometimes you think about a pot a lot, is it good or not? What can I do to it? And you agonise about it, but then decide it's really no good. So you go and smash it and you just…

John: …feel better! Yeah…

Gloria: It's a weight off your shoulders.

Do you work together in the studio?

John: I'm one end and Gloria's the other end. We can do four or five hours without speaking to each other. But if I get to a junction point, I can walk down to her end and say, ‘What do you think of this, am I wasting my time or is it coming good?’

Gloria: That's one good thing about having another person in the studio that won't talk bullshit. If you get honest feedback, which you don't often get, it’s really helpful.

John: I imagine most artists are the same. There's plenty of people around who say, ‘I really love your work, it’s wonderful, stunning!’ And I hate that!

Can you explain your process with porcelain briefly?

You can buy porcelain in a bag and throw with it, or you can buy slip porcelain and use it in different ways. I work with white and coloured porcelain slips, so I've got 50 or 100 different colours. I paint a story, or maybe I'll do a big screen of one thing on plaster then cover it with liquid clay and screen it then squeeze it off, the same way a screen printer would. When that dries enough so you can handle it a bit, you peel it away from the plaster and the clay will come away with the colour. When that's done, I might have 20 or 30 different textures, colours or designs. So when I’m working on a pot, I'll be in the middle of something and think, ‘I need a bit of red with purple spots’ and I'll go looking for that. Saying red with purple spots, that's really an ambit claim - I've never made anything with red and purple spots - but I know if I go looking, there'll be something there.

Gloria: John has boxes of these pre-prepared slabs, large and small, hundreds of pieces.

John: Occasionally I will think, I need a bit of mid-range red, but I'll look everywhere in my boxes and won't be able to find it. So then I realise I’ve used all that colour and need to make more. But mostly you do know what you've got there.

So you've got a filing cabinet of those pieces in your head? Was that affected by the stroke?

John: No, I've got perfectly normal long and middle memory. My weakness is I can't remember what I did 10 minutes ago, but that's my life now, that's okay.

I'm also deaf in one ear and I have double vision. So if I take my glasses off, I see four people instead of one, but I can use ordinary $20 reading glasses and I can still make things.

Can you tell us a bit about your work Cleave?

I bought this machete 50 odd years ago in George Street but it never got used much. The idea of cutting a pot in half came to me before I made the pot. So as I was making it I was thinking, ‘I’m going to cut it across here, how will it look on this side or that side?’ Then at the end I picked up the machete and thought I'm not sure I'm capable of this, I might kill somebody with this thing! So I said to Gloria, ‘Would you just come over here and hold this arm?’ It worked the first time.

So you built the pot specifically to cut it in half, did you make it differently?

All I did was just keep the idea in my mind and I knew it would pop out in the way that it did. Some potters make something and put it in the kiln and get it out and then think, what does this teach me? Or alternatively, you can be the sort of artist who names things and thinks things through then makes them. I'm mostly the first type. So I made this pot and left it to dry until it was what we call leather-hard - it's still got a little bit of moisture - and I just smacked it with the machete. It was pretty much one strike.

You also work with paper clay, can you explain it briefly?

Paper clay is a well-known and often used medium. It can be bought already made in plastic clay (plastic is the term for clay ready to handbuild with or throw on the wheel). But I make my own paper slip, which is a process of adding wet paper pulp to porcelain slip. The paper burns out in the firing but adds a lot of strength during the building process. It also gives a lot of wiggle room when adding pieces together that may not be the same level of moisture, which can cause problems otherwise. Paper is not added to my coloured slip.

I make slabs by layering up coloured slips on a flat plaster slab, making the design that is seen externally on the pot. The last layer is white paper slip. This provides a backing for the design. This last paper slip layer is what is seen internally.

One delicate design feature is the fine black lines that sometimes run through the slab or around individual pieces of design. This is achieved by making a very fine channel in the slab where you want the black mark to run, then filling it with iron oxide and smoothing it over.

Has the way you use colour changed?

John: I haven't changed the basis of my pallet in 25 years, but I know the way I'm using it now and the combinations are different. So for instance now if I'm using that brilliant bright red, I might screen some plain porcelain over it so it comes out lighter, it looks pink. I'll probably keep on doing that process forever - it’s still about changing and looking at things and figuring it out.

Also the stacked pieces that look like the pages of a book, that’s something I’ve been doing in the past couple of years. I go to my piles of coloured slabs and I'm thinking, ‘I've turned you over 50 times, that's the end for you!’ So I pile up colour on colour, slab on slab on slab, join them all together just for fun, then cut it to give it that look.

Gloria: The translucency is very important too with porcelain. If you can get the light right, it really adds to the piece.

Top image: John Tuckwell Porcelain installation, Object Space Gallery, Australian Design Centre.