Ousback’s pottery style was simple and functional with minimal decoration. He sometimes dug and processed his own clay. At first he was particularly influenced by British potter Lucie Rie but as he explored his new profession his interests were wide: he developed a collection of pots that spanned ages, styles and traditions. Many he gave to friends whom he knew shared his enthusiasm.
In 1993, Anders Ousback spoke at a potters conference in Adelaide. He recalled the experience of studying ceramics in the course at East Sydney Technical College that he had completed the year before. In activities that involved crushing rocks, stoking wood-fired kilns and the ‘breakneck speed’ of projects like ‘stoneware, raku, majolica, lustre, slip-casting, jigger-jolley, handbuilding, throwing, humping, and flopping’ into which he had been thrown, he explained how he had become aware that pottery was not simply tangential to his former profession but was a continuation of it. As he had done (and returned to do) with food, he found himself, in pottery, ‘searching for its heart’.
‘Both cooking and clay’, he pointed out, ‘have their origins in the application of heat, a chemical change, the taking of raw produce and its transformation. The kitchen is divided into the savoury and the sweet. The former, like creating with clay, is its fullest expression. The sweet kitchen with its exactitudes and demands of proportions, equals the glaze. Ratios of butter, flour and sugar are the fluxes, stabilisers and glass formers of cuisine. You glaze a tart. The process of sauté, roast and braise all equate to the raku, midrange and stoneware of clay. You wedge clay as you knead dough. Sieves, colanders and grinders all occur in the kitchen and the pottery. Pottery was first used to cook food, to store it and to eat from. Pottery and cookery are the most ancient crafts still practiced in our modern world.’
With the thoroughness and attention to detail that was characteristic of everything he did, Anders liked to be able to look closely at objects that he loved and that he was working with. It wasn’t enough to simply see something; he liked to touch the surface and texture of a pot and hold it to test its weight. And in the same way he understood so well the associations between making and appreciating food and wine, he also understood that what pots might mean is to do with the relationships that are made between maker and user.
Since his death in May 2004, many people have spoken about Anders Ousback’s wit, wicked humour, skills, imagination and intelligence and his perfect senses of timing, appropriateness, beauty and absurdity. Leo Schofield described him so perceptively as ‘a stone thrown into a still pond.’ We have all realised that there were many ponds of related friends, colleagues and family, and the ripples made by that stone have lapped over into all of them.
- Writers:
- Grace Cochrane
Powerhouse Museum
- Date written:
- 2012
- Last updated:
- 2012
