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Warrick Palmateer | Episode 493

Warrick Palmateer is a Western Australian potter who has over 30 years of experience working with clay. Warrick’s passion for working with clay started at the age of 15. He grew up on Western Australia’s Southwest coastline and now resides north of Perth, in a coastal town. Warrick has been an avid beach comber and surfer from a young age, and this love has given him a unique insight into the light, shade, movement and expression of the littoral zone – where land meets ocean.

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People were having a physical response to your work. Some were dancing around it. How does that impact you seeing people respond so physically to your work?

I was overwhelmed to be honest with you. I didn’t expect that type of response to my work and when the first image came through of someone dancing around my work, it was a video someone had posted, I thought it was a bit weird to be honest with you. But more of these images started appearing and I had so much feedback of people saying that they were actually moved and they were moved to tears, I had people tell me they actually had tears in their eyes when they walked into the space. It makes me as an artist feel so proud to draw emotions out of people because I have always genuinely thought music can do that to people, you know, and cinema can bring those types of responses but to have ceramic work to draw responses like that when they are walking around these objects in a gallery was so moving and touching and I am so happy people shard those experiences with me. It was truly overwhelming and it actually brought a tear to my eye when people told me those stories because I felt like I had done something really special.

What does that do to you in terms of what you want to make in the future?

It certainly created a big challenge for me to go forward from here because this body of work, I guess has been a long time in my head and it sort of came together so well that at the moment my next body of work that I want to work on I am not sure where I want to take it yet . I am in the process of actually designing a studio for my home here where I am and I have no doubt once the studio is built, the inspiration will still be drawn from where I live. I am very passionate about this area where I live, it will have those same sorts of notions and inspiration behind it. As far as scale goes, I like working large so I am sure it will be of a large scale. I have always regarded myself as a wheel thrower so  I guess it will be based on wheel throwing, but it may not be, I might completely free form hand build. I am not sure where I will take it.

Collaboration seems to have been a big part of your life. Would you be as good of a potter without collaboration with others?

No. The collaboration has been really important. You grow so much and learn so much from other people. Everyone has different ways of looking at the world and looking at clay and they way things work. I have been just very fortunate that I have been able to work with incredible people. I am approaching 50, I turn 50 this year, and I started when I was about fifteen. So that is 35 years of working in clay and I have worked with a lot of people in that time and they are all in me and all a part of me. And if it wasn’t for all those experiences I couldn’t be the same person that I am. I had incredible teachers around me when I was younger as well.

Well, I also teach a class one night a week going to what was formerly called Perth Technical College, where I started,  now called Central School of Art and Design. And I run a class on a Wednesday evening and I have a really beautiful class and a nice, loyal band of students and I have had some of them with me for the last five years. They enroll every term back into the class. I have got about fifteen to twenty students who I teach every year and there are some really great, young, up and coming potters coming through there. So it is really nice to be able to give back and I am very privileged to be able to have the knowledge that I have and I like sharing it with people. I am not someone who is secretive about what I do and I am happy to give anyone anything that I know. You want to keep this art form growing and getting stronger.

Does the medium of clay force a person to stay humble?

That is a good question. I think it does. I mean it is such a raw material. It is the earth, after all. And I don’t think you can ever totally master it. It always has a way of fighting you when you least expect it. No matter how much you think you know your kiln, your clay, your materials, it always seems to..it is like the ocean to be honest with you, it can bite and it can bite hard. I think that because of those things it creates, I guess, that humility in most potters that I know. Most potters that I know are very humble people and just enjoy talking like we are now about clay and sharing a cup of coffee out of one of their cups. I have got lots of cups from different potters from all over Australia. I am lucky,we have a very nice community here in Perth and I am sure you guys do over there do too. They are just really nice people and I sure it must be the same all over the world.

Tell me your thoughts about the Australian pottery community. 

It is a really, really, dynamic community. Australian ceramics has got everything. We have everything from working in porcelain, potter’s wheels, hand-building, we have got industrial ceramics here as well. We have got a really, nice, young crew coming through as well. There is a lot of interest in ceramics here in Australia. From people in their early twenties and in their thirties as well. So it has a bright future here in Australia, I really feel it. Certainly in my class that I am teaching on a Wednesday night I have a lot of females and males in their twenties who are really passionate about learning as much as they can about clay, glazes, firing kilns. And that is fantastic because I have not felt that for quite some time. I think we have a really bright future certainly in Western Australia where I am and I know it is the same on the east coast too. I think it is a bit of a revolt of everyone being online and social media and being on a screen. People want to actually have something tactile in their hands and clay is the ultimate material for that.

Book

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

Contact:

warrickpalmateer.com