What happens next!

Over five decades, Jeff Mincham AM has maintained a creative output widely acclaimed in Australia and overseas. Continuing his exploration of landscape themes through ceramic forms that are often substantial in scale, he is a highly influential and respected professional in his field, being recognised in 2009 as a Living Treasure: Master of Australian Craft by the Australian Design Centre, Sydney.

A lifetime of working with clay provides you with an ease of association and a comfortable familiarity that greatly helps with confidence at the beginning of a working sequence.

My early years of practice in the 1970s were dominated by the pragmatism of the functional ceramic form. With the benefit of an excellent training in ceramics in vibrant art schools with strong, disciplined curriculums, my pathway as a ceramic practitioner seemed quite clear. However, things evolved and by the 1980s I was taking a different path. The very nature of the material and my early training in painting were putting ideas and opportunities before me that gradually took hold and an evolution began in an unexpected new direction, which amazingly continues to this day.

Fluency with the ceramic medium is only gained the hard way, which means a lot of trial and error in the workshop and the acquisition of a deep knowledge of the many different processes involved. As with music, first you must master the instrument!
Then you need the courage to push whatever boundaries exist technically and creatively and the fortitude to cope with the resulting setbacks. Pushing boundaries involves a certain casualty rate! For me, the three firm pillars are FORM, SURFACE and STATEMENT. Given the vast range of the medium itself, well-resolved outcomes always seem to engage these simple fundamentals in such a way that the final body of work emerges as a coherent exhibition.

Over five decades I have produced about a hundred solo exhibitions and the process of working ideas into form still challenges. It is multi-layered and, to be honest, “messy,” in that it is always complicated by a range of temptation. “Keeping on theme” is often difficult, as you learn to put “discoveries” to one side for the future. “Store them up, but don’t lose them!” Seen over a long enough period of time things generate their own order in a kind of matrix of your creative thinking where some ideas seem to fall away only to curiously re-appear, often years later.

An interesting part of my making process that travels along with me as I work is a “resonant thought”—or more often a small group of thoughts in the background rather like key musical notes repeated, that keeps you on course; a navigational aid or beacon that overcomes the distractions that lure you away, so that the mood of a making sequence can be regained when interrupted. Given that the ceramic process can be spread over long periods of time, focus is always a challenge, and it is a high-risk venture in all of its aspects.

Underpinning the making process are the sources of inspiration and reference points that are the building blocks of an evolving personal iconography. While these are not immediately apparent to the viewer, they nevertheless guide every aspect of the creative process from the making of the form to developing the glazed surface.

Like so many of my generation the ceramics of “the Orient” and in particular Japan, have been a powerful and sustaining influence. Many aspects of the Japanese aesthetic would resonate with my response to the raw materials I use particularly in their inclination towards “naturalness” and away from excessive control. “Letting the clay speak” is a simple way of putting it.

This approach even finds its way into the glazing and firing processes. Having worked for seventeen years in the raku medium, my approach to surface treatments continues on from the way the form evolves. It starts with a “plan” which quickly turns to spontaneity, the firing process taking it even further. In reality it is an adventure with the final outcome never quite certain.

At the end of the day, I am and will always be a maker. I make to understand, to know, and best of all, to find out what happens next!

Exhibition
Resonance and Reflection – Landscape Transcended
18 June – 12 July 2025
Sabbia Gallery, Sydney

This profile was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 71, 2025.
Courtesy of the artist Despard Gallery, Hobart and Sabbia Gallery, Sydney