DAVID COLLINS • CERAMICIST
BERRY • AUSTRALIA

David Collins lives and works in the picturesque hills above Berry, Australia. His welcoming, light-filled studio is both a place of teaching and his place of making.

He has a longstanding love of clay and the processes attached to the interpretation of shape and surface. His elegant and masterful work is the culmination of experimentation and refinement, made during a practice stretching back over 35 years.

David draws particular influence from two sources: the Japanese tradition during the Muromachi period (16th century) - especially work from Tamba and Shigaraki - and from the English Studio Pottery movement, pioneered by Bernard Leach.

In the early 1920s, Leach and Japanese friend Shoji Hamada established a cross cultural conversation that resulted in a vital ceramic expression that's influenced ceramists around the world ever since. It's a conversation that's long informed David's creative energy and one he continues to this day.

David's work is focused on stoneware and he's currently exploring a blend of iron bearing commercial clay, mixed with a wild, secondary clay dug from a dam near his studio. The result is a stable body that does not crack and features strong iron response, depth of colour and spotted impurities, that bleed through the glaze with a spirited response.

On this base, he artfully applies slips under glazes, coloured with oxides and sprayed with wood ash, to create subtle, layered effects - giving his vessels a surface that mimics the forested environment the surrounds his home on the south coast of NSW.

WORK @ DEA

David is new to the DEA stable but we already feel like old friends. We love his refined and thoughtful vessels - made with assurance and imbued with an understated elegance that reveals itself slowly and rewards extended contemplation. This is work to live with forever.