Ian Dalzell – New Zealand Ceramic Artist

Ian Dalzell is the only potter in New Zealand firing with coal. Based near Lake Brunner on the West Coast, his mentors include Yvonne Rust & Barry Brickell.

Based at Kotuku, on NZ’s South Island West Coast, Ian uses a high BTU coal with some coking abilities which forms a bed on the fire bars in the kiln and allows the heat to be increased. He built Kotuku’s coal-fired salt-glaze kiln in 1989 and fires it regularly. The kiln takes fourteen hours to reach temperature, and uses a ton of coal per firing.

Clay Design

Ian’s pots are sought after by those who know his work. ‘Visually I pay great attention to where the forms start and finish,’ says Ian. ‘The lips and feet are the points to which the eye goes first. The in-between is less important in terms of what the eye immediately grasps.’

Fond of fat, round forms, he also enjoys tall cylindrical compositions. ‘I’ll sometimes bring them up as high as four or five feet and add coiled organic shapes to the tops. I’m also attracted to organic shapes in the landscape and like to incorporate ridgelines from local mountains into some of my forms.’

Mountainous inspiration is not far away. Almost overhanging Kotuku is Mt Alexander at 6,000 ft, sitting just to the east of the main fault line between the Australasian and Pacific plates. Looking up at such twin-peaked beauty provides inspiration, but intimate knowledge of the schist-bouldered peaks is even more attractive. February brings dry, stable enough weather for Ian to make the climb, and from the rocky second pinnacle he is afforded views in the distance of Mt Cook, the great ocean horizon, and in the opposite direction, up the Grey Valley to Inangahua.

Preferring a highly grogged clay body for large hand-built pieces, Ian uses a finer un-grogged clay body for domestic ware. He and partner Sue Pidgeon make most of their own ash glazes from wood or bone ash. ‘We get bones from the pig farm, burn them in the kiln, and grind them in a ball mill.’ Glazes made from these produce thick pearly textures.

Yvonne Rust – Pottery Teacher

Born in 1954, Ian grew up on his parent’s dairy farm at Kotuku, 31 kms east of Greymouth. In 1968 at Greymouth High School, he met the irrepressible Yvonne Rust, who became his art teacher.

‘Yvonne had a Dip.F.A.(1946) from Canterbury College School of Art and came to the Coast to explore the possibilities of making clay and using local raw materials. She taught high school during the day and at 3 o’clock, she’d go straight to her studio in the old Stewart’s Brewery to make pots. Her students were welcome there so I used to spend time at the studio. It was so different to what I had ever been around; clay, coal, pots being made; pots being fired.

‘She talked about the raw materials on the West Coast in a way that we had never really thought about them. At that time in the sixties, all the mills were busy sawing up rimu trees; all of it into 4x2s. No-one did woodwork, made furniture, or carved. It was the same with jade. The little factory that made trinkets for tourists out of jade in Hokitika really upset her. She said we should be carving sculptures from it. Well, it was not in our consciousness that you could actually carve sculptures out of jade.’

In 1974, at 21, Ian built his first kiln, a Barry Brickell designed, two-chambered, down-draught, wood-firing beast on the family farm at Kotuku. Barry pioneered wood-firing in NZ, adapting his ‘dutch-oven’ firebox concept from the old West Coast sawmills which all used dutch-oven fire-boxes to fire their boilers.’

‘In the early 70’s pottery was a viable way to earn a living,’ says Ian. Government import restrictions in place since 1958 meant that NZ made domestic ware was virtually without competition and a huge movement of potters built workshops and kilns to produce goods for the hungry market. Yvonne Rust had been at the forefront of the clay movement, a pioneer in the field since the mid 50’s.

Today the flood of china and porcelain domestic ware imports has forced potters to experiment with work which reflects their environment, thereby avoiding factory competition. Dalzell says, ‘It’s a much more genuine Kiwi style of work which has brought with it a need to explore ways to create forms which reflect where we live, People still like individual, handmade things.’

Resources: Theresa Sjoquist interview with Ian Dalzell

©Theresa Sjoquist