When Richard Jones unloaded his latest arrivals from the kiln in time for Open Day at his Possum Creek studio he couldn’t have been more pleased.

“It looks like a sea of bowls,” says Jones.  “The celadons did really well on the raku clay, and the shinos did all sorts of weird and wonderful things – as shino does.”

It was Jones’s partner Jo Immig, who coined the word ‘plowls’ for the fabulous double-fired three-glaze plate/bowls above.  “We use them all the time now,” says Jones.  “They’re wonderful for eating off.  I was very pleased with this batch, the copper reds can be quite tricky and can end up bright blue if the firing doesn’t work!”

“These cups, or glasses are porcelain inlay on raku clay,” says Jones.  “I carve the design- sometimes quite random-and fill it with porcelain. When it’s partially dry I scrape off the surplus to reveal the design. I started doing this as an experiment and discovered it was called Mishima in Japan.”  For Jones part of the appeal of pottery is the constant experimentation.  “It’s led me to creative places I could never have imagined when I started,” he says.

Jones call these his ‘star bowls’, and says they are reminiscent of his galaxy paintings. “I’ve stocked up for the Open Studios day,” he says.  “I love it when people visit me here where I live and work – it’s all about getting back in touch with nature.  There’s the roosters, Sebastian, Rupert and Alisdair; the brush turkeys – if you’re lucky the koalas – sometimes a python curled up asleep, and hundreds of bird varieties.”

“Each piece –  including the five dollar pieces will save several hundred rainforest trees in Sumatra thanks to Kelvin Davies and the Rainforest Trust,” says Jones, and for him the Open Day is not just a chance to show off his incredible range, but with every bowl sold, he knows one more piece of rainforest has been saved.

Richard Jones studio is at 56 Gittoes Lane Possum Creek and will be open this weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 10.00am to 4.00pm.

The post Richard Jones and the Power of Pottery appeared first on .

Verandah Magazine’s Political Potter, Richard Jones – remembers his grandather, and the terrible after-effects of the war, and wonders if our glorification of Anzac Day serves any purpose.

My Grandpa Bombardier Barwick was buried in mud at Gallipoli, clawed his way out and ended up on the killing fields of the Somme. This giant of a man was well suited to hurling missiles at the enemy while his mates were ordered over the top, by safely ensconced generals in immaculate uniforms and glasses of cognac and cigars, to trudge through churning mud right into German machine gun fire.
Churchill thought it was a great idea to open up lines of communication with Russia to supply them with weapons, but didn’t reckon on the tenacity of the Turks.  Over 40,000 allied lives later and double that for brave Turks, the catastrophe came to an end.
Imagine, 1.25% of all Australians fought at Gallipoli and over eight thousand died – for no reason at all. That’s the equivalent today of sending 275,000 young Aussies to fight in Iraq and 40,000 dying in a matter of months – and then retreating.

Captain Leslie Morshead in a trench at Lone Pine after the battle at Gallipoli, looking at both Australian and Ottoman dead on the parapet. Source: Wikipedia

Life was cheap then. Our teenagers were expendable.
Today every time a professional soldier dies, the PM and Opposition Leader turn up at the televised funeral. Imagine if they had to attend five thousand funerals a month.
My grandpa, who died before I was born, aided by the demon drink, would I am sure be bemused by today’s massive commemoration – one can hardly call it a celebration- of those ghastly days one hundred years ago.
Maybe it’s now time to finally let them all lie in peace.

The post As we remember, perhaps too, we can let go appeared first on .

 Richard Jones, our Political Potter finds that sometimes no matter how much you want to rescue something, resistance gets in the way – but persistance is always a virtue.

I spent much of yesterday trying to rescue beetles crawling around the floor where I was firing.
It was a hopeless task.
I turned them back on their feet but they were soon upside down. Again.

When I picked them up they seemed to want to burrow so I took a handful outside and put them amongst leaves under a tree and wished them luck.
It was an alien environment for them in the kiln room, all concrete and metal.
Much of our human environment is inimical to nature – but not all.
Jo showed me photographs of two new towers at the old brewery site in Broadway Sydney covered in plants – two columns of green.
Evidently native bees were harvesting nectar from the flowers – and this in what was once one of the grimiest parts of Sydney.
 It’s a case of accidental ‘rewilding’.

There’s a powerful new global movement to purposefully ‘rewild’ the planet as discussed in George Monbiot’s book FERAL – rewilding the land, sea and human life.
 (Monbiot describes himself as a ‘slightly unhinged adventurer’. He trained as a zoologist at Oxford University, was the BBC’s first investigative environmental reporter and has written and produced numerous articles, talks and books on environmentalism. goodreads.com

Needless to say rewilding is becoming extremely urgent.
Neoliberalism, the dominant paradigm since the 1980s, is conducting a devastating war on nature and it appears that nothing can stand in the way of profits for the giant corporations and the 1% who control them.
Right now the neoliberals are winning this war and if it continues in this manner by the end of this century this planet of ours will be virtually uninhabitable for humans and millions of other species.

Naomi Klein covers this in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. (thischangeseverything)
As she says we need to reimagine our relationship to the Earth- and we are fast running out of time.
Australia’s own Prime Minister is an arch proponent of neoliberalism and he essentially governs for the 1%, not the other 99%.
 We need to get his lot out as soon as we can in order to start beginning the repair job so desperately needed.

We all need to be part of this.
If we fail, our grandchildren and their children will never forgive us.

The post Hey, hey they’re the beetles… appeared first on .

Australian native Blue Banded Bee

 Life in the city, in the fast lane, living on sugar, white flour and caffeine, rushing, oblivious of others, from one meeting to another, playing nonstop with the iPhone, cuts us off from real life, and from our original nature, writes our Political Potter Richard Jones…

British philosopher and writer Alan Watts commenting on the human experience put it like this:
 “As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, ‘It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.’ How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”

“This is a Flame tree I planted years ago, covered in these brilliant red flowers. Above, half way up, is a mistletoe bush and another baby one has established further down. The Mistletoe bird a regular visitor. On the right of the flower is a self sown epiphytic hanging moss. The pumpkins have doubled after two nights of rain and another shower is on the way. I just went for a walk through the young forest. It’s damp and lush. The sandpaper figs are heavy with fruit and the endangered Small-leaved tamarinds are covered in flowers as are the Silky oaks- with masses of orange blossoms. It all changes so fast after good rains…”

Here in Possum Creek we constantly experience the subtle, gentle movements of nature, whisper of leaves, ever changing shadows through the trees, distant calls of the whip bird and kookaburra, cheeps of finches and buzzing of bees as they busy themselves on numerous fragrant blossoms. 
If you put your ear to my studio wall you can hear the hum of many thousands of bees going quietly about their business. We could never separate ourselves again from this existence to live amongst the raucous sounds of traffic, smell of car fumes and hoards of rushing strangers and where birds are a rare sight, let alone other wildlife.

Alan Watts is right, every second is a precious jewel to be considered and relished and not just “gulped down”.

The post The sound of 40,000 bees humming appeared first on .

Our political potter ponders the never-ending inter-connection in the animal kingdom.

Give us this day our daily flower photo – this beautiful orchid is attached to the orange tree next to the verandah.

I had two encounters with pythons over the past few days.

One was curled up at the edge of the road as I was off to meet friends at the Mullumbimby farmers’ market. I turned the car around to shoo it off. It didn’t move so I picked it up and saw that it had a little blood on its mouth but otherwise it was very active. I pushed it into a shopping bag and took it to the side and it gripped my arm tightly as I unloaded it, hoping that it will recover from its injury.

When I returned home a couple of hours later, Jo told me that there had been a big kerfuffle in the veggie garden.

Lucy Longlegs, our brush turkey Bruce’s new girlfriend, had broken the rules and entered the enclosed veggie garden. She then fluttered up into the overhanging mulberry in a big flurry. Jo went to investigate and saw a large python curled up exactly where Lucy had been scratching up mulch.

I went to have a look with Jo and replace all the mulch and there was the python stretched along the fence.

I’ll warrant that Lucy won’t go back in there. The others never do.

Peace now reigns (for the moment).

The post Lucy Longlegs discovers that pythons rule – ok appeared first on .

Azaleas are arrayed once more.

Our political potter, Richard Jones, finds a sunny Sunday morning a perfect moment to wish everyone a Happy Mithras, and to give us, in his indomitable fashion, a wonderful link between flowers, science, religion and more…

Azaleas are arrayed in all their glory once more.
  This morning I saw the Flame tree was also covered in bright red flowers and being visited by the Mistletoe bird.
  Happy Mithras Day by the way. Every Sunday is Mithras day- it was reserved as a holy day for the sun god.
Until about two hundred years after Christ was executed, Mithras was the main god and worshipped from India to as far west as Scotland.
 He was born on December 25 of a virgin mother who was adored as the Mother of God. He was placed in a manger and attended by shepherds. He also had twelve disciples. Strange similarities?

I’ve talked about this in a session on beliefs and truths recently at the Byron Philo cafe.  
I quoted Bertrand Russell who said: “Minds do not create truth or falsehood. They create beliefs, but once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false, except in the special case where they concern future things which are within the power of the person believing.

Talking of beliefs – since 2009 the loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland has tripled. The loss is now 500 cubic kilometres a year. This loss is now unstoppable. Sea level rise is locked in.  Climate sceptic Tony Abbott boycotted the UN Conference on Climate Change and when Julie Bishop spoke, most nations walked out leaving the chamber virtually empty.  You didn’t read about that in the Murdoch media.  We are the pariah of the southern seas.  We have so little faith in science we don’t have a Science Minister and have slashed science funding to the lowest levels in a generation. It is particularly relevant today when false beliefs are determining our future.

Anyway, it’s a fittingly beautiful Sunday and I’m off to find some more mulberries accidentally left by the birds and to water newly planted trees and pumpkins.

The post And So Happy Mithras… appeared first on .

Potter Richard Jones: “The word ‘retirement’ is not in my lexicon…”

Never averse to standing up for the causes he believes in, Richard Jones was the first convenor of Friends of the Earth Australia, and assisted in the founding of Greenpeace. A ‘ratbag’ (as he’s often been called) environmentalist, as a Democrat and later Independent politician he was an early advocate for green politics and animals rights issues. He lives  near Byron Bay in a house he shares with his partner, environmentalist Jo Immig, and an assortment of wildlife including paper wasps, pythons, koalas and tree frogs. Verandah caught up with him on his verandah – naturally!

Q:  You were a politician for many years, and an eco-warrier for many more – when did you decide to become a potter?

I was handling a couple of my mother’s pieces she had made a few weeks before she died – very suddenly. She had just startedrecovering from the equally sudden death of my father and had made only a few pieces of pottery.  I realised that these were the most precious things I had of her, something she had made with her own hands.  I thought it would be good to leave a few objects like that for my son and three grandchildren. I started learning with Lucy Vanstone in 2007 and became entranced with it. As I made more pieces, it soon became evident that we would not have enough space for them so I had better find homes for them. I tried a small market stall and was amazed to sell sixty pieces and then I tried another market.

Q:  Your pottery has a beautiful almost Japanese feel to it – how do you feel it’s progressed over the past four years?

I love the Japanese aesthetic, particularly their notion of wabi sabi. I’m not keen on perfect pottery that could almost be machine made. I found my wonkiest pieces sold first. I don’t make them deliberately wonky but do allow nature to take its course both during throwing and firing. You simply never know what to expect when the kiln door swings open after a reduction firing. Every piece I make is an experiment and I never quite know how I will carve it or even glaze it. Not worrying about being perfect allows me the freedom to make individual and idiosyncratic pieces.

Q:  What’s it like being a regular market-stall holder?

I now have so much respect for market stall-holders. They are up before dawn and back at dusk. They work so hard and sometimes for not too much return. There are quite a number of young women who are making, baking, growing, designing products and carving out their own living. There’s a lot of camaraderie amongst stall-holders.
It is tremendous fun meeting such a variety of people from all walks of life and from different countries. My pottery is now in a number of countries and scattered in homes around Australia.

Q:  Where did you live before you came to the Northern Rivers and what attracted you to the area?

I first came to legendary Byron Bay in the sixties and my first question was: “Where are all the trees?” It’s changed a lot since then – there are many more trees and a host of fascinating creative people. We’ve made so many more like-minded friends here than we could ever have in Sydney where I spent much of the previous 38 years.
Originally friends from Sydney’s Northern Beaches started moving up and I followed them.

Q:  I know the money you make goes to buying rainforest – so do you do this for love rather than an income?

About ten per cent of the gross revenue goes to buying rainforest. Every firing saves around 750 square metres of rainforest in Sumatra, land that would otherwise be cleared for palm oil plantations thereby destroying the homes of endangered tigers, clouded leopards, gibbons  and other creatures. I use gas and feel I have an obligation to more than offset that by saving forests and planting trees. My customers also like the idea that they are contributing. Each piece I sell saves five square metres of forest, even five dollar pieces, so I make five dollar pieces specifically and young girls in particular buy them.

 Q:  What about retirement? You’re 74 but you’re not showing any signs of slowing down…

I’ll be retired when I’m interred.  Plenty of time to lie around when I’m dead. The word “retirement” is not in my lexicon.

Q:  What do you love best about living in this area?

The people, the beaches, the abundant organic food, the spirit and the fact we now have koalas in the trees I planted years ago. They have returned after an absence of about eighty years – as have other wild creatures. It’s heaven on earth.

The post The Political Potter appeared first on .