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Muriel Mary MacDiarmid was born in Brisbane on 21 February 1879, the eldest daughter of Duncan MacDiarmid, a banker of Scottish descent, and Jane Cameron née MacKergow, who was born in the then Moreton Bay District of New South Wales. She was educated at the Brisbane Girls Grammar School where she excelled in music, watercolour and drawing. The MacDiarmid girls had lessons with the well known Queensland artist Isaac Walter Jenner and later, in about 1921, when she was in her forties, Muriel joined L. J. Harvey 's classes at the Central Technical College.

A group of her pottery was included in the Second Annual Exhibition of work by Art Students of the Central Technical College in December 1933 and the Sixth Annual Exhibition in November 1937; she may have been included in the 1935 and 1936 exhibitions but individuals are not cited. She exhibited pottery with the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland 1930-38. In 1931 a reviewer for Brisbane’s The Telegraph found 'Great originality in the decoration of her pottery, an outstanding piece being a jug with a fish twined around the lip, its tail serving as a handle and its mouth as a spout’, while in 1937 'A futuristic blue and white pottery horse holding fast the blotting paper’ was granted approval by The Courier Mail reviewer .

In contrast to many of Harvey’s students, she only exhibited at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association on one occasion in 1933, a slip decorated piece. Miss MacDiarmid exhibited collections of pottery and china painting with the Royal Queensland Art Society 1932-34, in 1936 a 17th century puzzle jug, an Indian bottle and a Turkish jug, a group of pottery in 1937 and a pottery ewer in 1938. In 1935 she won a second prize for works produced by students of technical colleges in Australia in a competition sponsored by the Society of Arts and Crafts of New South Wales with a Bulgarian bottle. (The competition required that the design for the piece be submitted as well.) Photographic evidence also shows Miss MacDiarmid was included in an exhibition in New South Wales in the late 1930s.

She had a particular interest in lettered decoration and folksy quotations often appeared on her pieces. Especially noteworthy is a plaque of 1938 carved with 'No handicraft can/ with our art compare/ our pots are made/ of what we potters are.’ (illustrated in the preface to Peter Timms’s Australian Studio Pottery & China Painting [1986]). She had another noteworthy specialty in the production of jugs and, from 1933, gained considerable local fame for her series of reproductions of antique drinking vessels from Germany, Hungary, Japan, England, China, Inca, Corinth, etc. These were reproduced primarily for their educational value as there were no equivalent collections of original vessels in Queensland. She copied models in the Victoria and Albert Museum and also sought the assistance of Mr. H. A. Longman, the Director of the Queensland Museum. A collection of some 25 of these vessels were subsequently bequeathed to the Royal Brisbane Historical Society. Her dedicated research gained her a reputation as an authority on ancient ceramics and she delivered talks to groups such as the Willmore Discussion Club on 'English Pottery from the Thirteenth to the beginning of the Nineteenth century’.

As the eldest daughter, hers was the responsibility, common at this time, to care for her aging parents. She set up a small studio attached to the kitchen of her home in Park Road, Milton. Miss MacDiarmid also taught a less rigid version of Harvey’s hand building techniques in this studio. She emphasised pinch building and was particularly concerned with the correct thickness of the clay (to prevent firing failures) and with the attachment of handles. She did not have an extensive number of pupils (probably no more than six a week) as only two at a time could be accommodated in her studio but Annie Scott, Gladys Sharp, her niece Dorothy McPhee and a Mrs Lane studied with her. She was hindered by frail health throughout her life and the reduction of her exhibitions from 1937 indicates its further failing. She died in Brisbane on 5 November 1941.

Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R. Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery

Date written:

2003

Last updated:

2011