SHANNON GARSON

Music: The Underscore Orkestra “Jazzy Ashes”

SHANNON GARSON

Ceramic artist

Maleny, QLD, Australia

May I present you with the most smiley, friendly and generous ceramic artist around: Shannon Garson! She’s the queen of a Queenslander’s castle in the beautiful town of Maleny, 90km north of Brisbane in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast. With her husband Trevor Hart, jazz musician and cheesemaker extraordinaire, and their two daughters, they live the life of dreams. Both parents work from home, in their own quarters, that is, when Shannon isn’t travelling Australia on one of her Creative Voyage Tours with a mob of likeminded artists and epicureans. Read More

Photos I took that day…

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The day I visited Shannon was at the absolute beginning of my photography and filmmaking journey. It was June 2017! I felt completely out of my league when Annabelle Hickson (now editor in chief of Galah) and I showed up on Shannon’s doorstep to offer a free “photos and video” package to build up our portfolio.

Displaying on this page the very few photos I took that day (it was Annie’s part at the time, but I couldn’t help myself and snapped a few) and screen this little film makes me pretty embarrassed… I had just learned how to switch the video button on my DSLR. Gosh I would do it differently these days. But at the time I was thrilled to be able to show Shannon’s work in a slow (much too slow) way. And boy I’m glad fear didn’t stop me, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have just finished film school this year.

Wasn’t it kind of Shannon’s to welcome us into her home and studio and make us a delicious meal, I still remember to this day, knowing the rookies we were. I filmed that epic dinner at 100 frames per second in slow motion! The only way I knew how to tame movement and film until recently. I should probably edit it as a mini doco.

I’m very thankful to the talented artists who helped me build up confidence and skills by accepting to face my camera and showing me their process. I hope i get to film Shannon again, with my upgraded skills, and make a more substantial film one day. Her process is very intricate from the lump of clay on the wheel to the intricate drawing and mark making on the final porcelain vessel. She is a very keen observer of nature and tells the story of the ecosystems she studies. I wish I had more photos of her work. Please have a look at her website, it’s worth the click, it’s sensational.

A few days ago, I contacted her to ask her if she’d be part of my 30 day challenge, and reply to my interview questions to people who make the world more beautiful. Here it is below. I hope you enjoy the voyage.

Connect with Shannon

@shannongarson | @australianceramics

INTERVIEW

I was born in Brisbane and I live in a tiny town called Maleny in Jinibara country on the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in Queensland. It is sub-tropical rainforest where the silhouettes of the mighty Bunya pines tower over the rainforest canopy. Much of Maleny was cleared for dairy farming so the green paddocks give way to remnant rainforest.
I throw porcelain pots on a wheel, bowls, jugs, plates, vases. All the shapes on the wheel are bound by centrifugal force, as the wheel spins the shapes emerge.
These vessels are canvasses for drawings, line, composition, colour and shape leading the eye around the belly, over the rims and around the foot.
The drawing, the form and the beautiful, white porcelain engaged in shifting relationships, a pendulum, swinging back and forth.
I’m interested in the natural world of leaf litter, clouds, weather, invertebrates and birds. The drawings swing between abstraction and representation as familiar objects appear and dissipate. I try to capture the feel of the ecosystem.
The strong lines and beautiful composition in the works of Georgia O’Keefe inspired me as a teenager and continue to fascinate me.
Yes, I always wanted to be an artist.
When I finished my degree at art college I went to England by myself. I stayed there for ages and earned money and took off for France and Italy every time I had enough. I never knew anyone where I was going.
One time I went to France to visit my friend’s cousin, a woman who I’d never met who lived in the deep countryside beyond Bordeaux with her three children. I travelled the whole day on different trains and about 10 o’clock at night hopped off at a deserted provincial station to meet Jane.
She drove and drove until we got to a huge stone farmhouse and she put me to bed, in the attic under the rafters where I could see the stars through the slats on the ceiling.
We sat by the massive, stone fireplace and ate cheese and laughed at the kids and talked and walked along the old Roman roads lined with cherry trees.
I went walking on a rainy afternoon and came to a green field of grain surrounded by woods and, as I pushed through the wheat leaving a dark green swathe behind me in the pale green grain, a deer stepped out of the shadows. Sometimes the world is just extravagant.
It’s hard to lose all sense of time and place when you are an artist mother. Time is always knocking on the door of your inspiration! Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when I know I should be making dinner, the light is so beautiful at my desk and the music is perfect and I just want to draw on pots forever.
So many people helped me, one time, when I was really just starting out, I saw a small picture of a perfect bowl in a magazine so I found out who made it and phoned him. It was potter Phil Elson and he was so generous to me when I was starting out. I went to his studio in Trentham and stayed with Phil and his lovely family. His generosity and skill had a huge effect on my work. He lives in Castelmaine now and still makes perfect bowls.
Being and artist and a mother is very hard. It involves learning so many new skills, particularly around time management and adjusting your expectations. I found that if I could learn to rock and roll with the rhythms of the house that motherhood made me a better artist. I learnt to focus very fiercely when I had the chance to be in the studio, to understand that some days what I thought I would achieve just wasn’t going to happen (a LOT of days!)
Letting go of my old, independent, singular self was hard but now my children are just about grown up it really does seems like that time was just a fleeting minute (impossible to believe when you have a little baby I know!)
Beautiful. Joan Chittister spent much of her life writing about beauty, she says “When we begin to recognize beauty, to see it all around us, it has done its work on us. Steeped in beauty, we have become beautiful ourselves.”
Kindness, perseverance and attention
I’m not a collector but I love visiting my friends who collect stuff. Looking at other people’s houses is one of my favourite things.
It’s not really a possession but I love my home. It is my favourite place and I’m lucky to have it. Without my home I wouldn’t do what I do.
I love a really lemony, zesty chick pea salad.
Finely dice cucumber, tomato and capsicum. Add to a bowl with a can of chickpeas. Chop heaps of basil, parsley and rocket and greens and add them to the bowl.
Make the sharpest, lemoniest dressing by crushing two cloves of garlic with salt in a mortar and adding olive oil. Keep pounding and adding oil and it emulsifies into a kind of mayonnaise. Add the juice and finely grated rind of a lemon and pour the delicious salty lemony mixture all over the herbs, chickpeas and vegetables.
I loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Bear
There are two songs I’m listening to a lot:
“Punisher” by Phoebe Bridgers and “7 Chanson Grises: No.5 L’Heure exquise” by Sofie Von Otter
Ted Secombe Australian ceramicist is a master of porcelain and form.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is a master of composition, colour and dynamic movement captured with line.
Freda Davies is a wonderful artist; her brother Archer Davies is also amazing.
My house is my favourite place, my second favourite is Minjerribah, Stradbroke Island.
This year I worked on a series of vessels and an art event in Maleny about this rock formation in Tasmania called the Tesselated Pavement.
The Tesselated Pavement is a stark shelf of rock jutting out to sea from Eaglehawk Neck. Eons ago as the lava that formed the pavement cooled, it created a surface of rectangular pools and cracks where the tide deposits seaweed, shells, treasure and trash of the deeps. The pavement gives way to deep blue drop offs and chasms fringed with green/gold bull kelp that rises and falls, slapping the surface with a sound like a pile of rubber galoshes falling down a mountain!
In Maleny I showed the first work from this series in an old school hall, the hall was dim and the spherical pots were illuminated on long mirrored tables. As the audience moved around ghostly music started, deep and resonant it led the audience outside and as they looked back at the hall they saw cellist Louise King playing in front of a huge film of the drawing and pots in process projected over the entire side of the building. The final rays of sunset streaked orange across the sky as a giant paintbrush drew the Tesselated Pavement in film and the windows of the hall opened to show the round pots all sitting, illuminated inside. Work from this series is showing in a solo exhibition at Beaver Galleries in Canberra in February.