Elder Wing of Australian Art: Audio Described Tour
Work 14 of 15

Gladys Reynell was born in Glenelg, South Australia in 1881, and today is recognised as South Australia’s first Studio potter, and the first potter in Australia to introduce Modernist ethos into the crafts.

Reynell was trained by artist Margaret Preston in Adelaide before the pair left for Paris in 1912 to absorb the principles of the French Post Impressionists. Later in London towards the end of 1916, Reynell began to learn pottery at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and would later use her skills to assist the war effort by teaching pottery to shell-shocked soldiers.

Returning to Australia in 1919, Reynell established the state’s first pottery studio at Reynella, (now a suburb of Adelaide named in the 1850s after the Reynell family). Gladys Reynell’s pottery is often illustrated with native animals or simple abstract graphic designs using sgraffito, a technique in ceramics made by scratching through a surface to reveal a layer of contrasting colour. The earliest sample of pottery by Reynell date from January 1917, when a sample of clay from Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia was sent to her in London. Emu beaker made by hand in 1917 is a testament to her early encounter with clay, its thickness and simplicity are evidence of the challenges of a new material. Reynell made her work appear deliberately hand-made. Reynell has covered the clay in a warm brown slip and sketched her design onto the beaker. The background has been gently scratched away to show the contrasting colour beneath. The result is not unlike a woodcut with its strong graphic quality and striking depictions of emus.

Pottery, like other crafts in this period, had been undergoing dramatic changes, as the Arts and Crafts philosophy of the ‘handmade’ transformed what was once manual labour to an expressive outlet. Australian artists began to move away from British and European themes towards the depiction of Australian subject matter. Reynell forged her own path as an artist-potter responsible for all stages of production, from digging the clay to throwing and firing the pottery. In ‘Reynella Pottery: A Book for South Australia: Women in the first hundred years’ by Gladys Osborne, Reynell described the idea of making pots from Australian clay as ‘the most delightful thing on earth – clay which one would discover as it were, for oneself – clay that had never before known a potters’ hands’.

This earthernware beaker by Australian artist Gladys Reynell, was made in London in 1917.

The beaker is a 10cm high cup with no handle. It is 8.7cm in diameter at the lip, tapering down to a base that is slightly narrower. Made of clay, the inside of the beaker is earth brown.

A shallowly carved pattern on the outside surface of the beaker depicts four adult emus in side-profile. Known as sgraffito, the areas that have not been carved are the same brown colour as the inside of the beaker, and the carved area, which forms the background of the design is white.

A horizontal line encircles the beaker two centimetres below the lip. A second wider irregularly edged line encircles the base, this is the grass upon which the emus stand.

Emus are soft-feathered, brown, flightless Australian birds with rounded bodies and long legs. Reaching almost two metres in height and similar to an ostrich, they have small heads with pointed triangular beaks and large eyes atop long narrow necks.

The emus are depicted in different poses facing either left or right. Three emus stand with their heads above the horizontal line. The fourth emu leans down with its chest lowered, but its head turned upwards.

The emus are in silhouette, for there are no additional details such as feathers or eyes.

Irregular diagonal lines appear above and below the horizontal line, like tree-branches around the heads of the emus. Between two of the standing emus, the lines fan out like the leaves of a fern.

The branch-like lines also parallel the curved back of one emu like an archway. Above this emu, between the lip and the horizontal line, the year the beaker was made has been carved, 1917.