Design and Art Australia Online

Phillip McConnell is the son of Carl McConnell (1926-2003), Queensland’s most significant potter of the post World War Two generation. He was born in Burbank, California in 1947, the eldest in a family of two sons and two daughters born to Carl Russell McConnell and his Brisbane-born wife Bernice (Bunny) née Pearson. The family returned to Brisbane in 1948 where he was educated but from the age of 12 to 17 years, Phillip McConnell trained under his father at his Pinjarra Pottery in the outer Brisbane suburb of Pinjarra Hills. He enrolled in a Diploma Course in Pottery at the Central Technical College but after 18 months ceased study there as he was offered a formal apprenticeship under his father.

In 1968 McConnell visited Hawaii to try its fabled surfing beaches (he has been a keen surfer for many years) but because he was born in the United States he was taken into the draft and spent his military service, like his father, in the United States Navy. He re-started his career when he returned to Brisbane in 1970 and two years later he held a solo exhibition of his ceramics at The Potters Gallery in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. It was seen by the senior Japanese potter, Tatsuzo Shimoaka (b.1919), who was visiting Australia at the time and he invited McConnell to work with him at his pottery at Mashiko, Japan the following year. While studying with Shimoka in 1973, McConnell was introduced to the Fujiwara family of potters and was invited to spend six months working in their pottery at Imbe, Bizen.

McConnell, like his father, had the facility to replicate traditional Chinese and Japanese pottery styles, and, after he returned to Australia in 1974, he established 'The Pottri’ outside Toowoomba in 1975 where the influence of Japanese ceramics dominated his output for most of the next decade. In the early 1980s the influence of Chinese celadons and blue and white decoration asserted itself.

Since 1975 McConnell has held ten solo exhibitions of his work (including the prestigious David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney) and established a considerable reputation for himself. He received the Fletcher Brownbuilt Award (New Zealand), the Gladstone Ceramic Award in 1979 and the Townsville Pacific Festival Award in 1980.

A substantial inheritance provided him with the opportunity to cease pottery in 1984 but in 1992 he established another pottery at Harbourtown Marina, Noosa, producing a specialised range of giftware which utilised local clays, and shell and seaweed firing.

Two years later he reopened his Toowoomba pottery. Here he began to specialise in carved designs and re-started his exhibiting career with solo displays at the Andrew Vincent Gallery, Brisbane in 1994 and the Cintra Galleries, Brisbane in 1995 and 1997. These works saw the development of a more individual style. In 2001 McConnell organised a survey exhibition of his work at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, 'Phillip McConnell: Forty years of ceramic art tradition 1960-2000’, which subsequently toured southern Queensland. However, it soon became clear to him that the vitality of the studio pottery movement in Australia was passing and he ceased his active production around 2003. In 2006 he oversaw the disposal of representative examples of his career to various Queensland institutions and retired to live in Tasmania.

Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery.

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R.

Date written:

2007

Last updated:

2011