Exhibition Dates: Saturday 31 January – Sunday 1 March 2009
Artist: Les Blakebrough
The Devonport Regional Gallery was showing Les Blakebrough: Ceramics. The exhibition is part of the Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft touring series and was presented by Object Gallery in collaboration with Craft Australia.
The exhibition represented a different series of works made from a unique clay developed through a research project the artist spent years working on. Blakebrough’s research involved testing a range of types of kaolin clay looking at plasticity, shrinkage, warping, iron content and translucency to produce a world class product that he named ‘Southern Ice’; it is now marketed to ceramicists’ world-wide.
Les Blakebrough was born in England and came to Australia in 1948. Since arriving in Tasmania he has assisted in the development of artist-in-residency projects, summer schools, guest lecture tours, apprenticeships and research developments.
Les is regarded as one of Australia’s leading ceramic artists; his work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all Australian State galleries and many international collections, including the British and Danish Royal collections.
The exhibition was supported by the Tasmanian Government through Arts Tasmania, the University of Tasmania through the Office of the Vice Chancellor, and Object’s National Exhibitions Strategy funded by the Australia Council.
