Ceramicist John Stewart’s wall vases and vases invite contemplation.

Ceramicist John Stewart and his artist partner Leonie Lane have spent many years teaching others art and design – now they’re both working full-time from their studio and loving it, writes Candida Baker.

Driving up Stewarts Road, just outside Clunes, heading for the hamlet of Booyong, I’m pondering the coincidence that I’m going to talk to ceramicist John Stewart.  But of course, when I get to Stewart’s house and studio, it turns out to be no coincidence at all.

“My family have been here for generations,” he tells me.  “When they first put the road through there were so many Stewarts living around here they called it after us.”  The house and studio, where both Stewart and his partner, artist and print-maker, Leonie Lane live and work, is perched high on a hill looking towards over rolling green hills towards the east.  “That was my parents house across the road,” Stewart says, “and the family also used to have the dairy down the road.”

The artist and the ceramicist: Leonie Lane and John Stewart outside their studio

Strangely, for these parts where almost everybody comes from somewhere else, Lane too is from the area, and for both of them their surroundings constantly inform their work.  In Stewart’s case, his latest collection of vases with their unusual design of a slip-in test-tube pay homage to the immediate world around him – his photographs of hoop pines, ducks and birds in flight transforming themselves into decoration that invite contemplation.

For Stewart, a long-term teacher at TAFE in Lismore, leaving work has proved to be the impetus he needed to turn some of his long-held creative ideas into reality.  “I knew I wanted to design these vases,” he says, “but they were always going to be a lot of work.  It’s been done with a 3D design program, and everything had to be mathematically exact in order for the test-tubes to slip in perfectly andn for there to be the right amount of space for the metal plate around the top.”  He has even designed, and prints out from home the beautiful presentation boxes.  His vision has paid off – the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney stocks them, and locally they’re stocked by Art Piece Gallery and the Tweed Regional Gallery.

If Stewart’s work has a zen-like simplicity to it, then Lane’s work is the polar opposite – its complex symbolism and powerful imagery drawing a viewer into an emotional journey.  Lane, who has taught digital art and design in the Visual Arts Program at Southern Cross University for 20 years, deals with notions of ‘place’, personal narrative and social identity via digital imagery and installation.  One of my personal favourites is ‘Nanna’ – a black and white print created in memory of her grandmother.  “My grandmother was fascinating,” Lane says. “She lived here in the middle of the country but she was quite ‘posh’ – she went to finishing school at St. Hilda’s.  She was also a fine equestrienne, and she loved the natural world.  I wanted to create a piece that summed up her country-life but also the fact that she was a ‘gentlewoman’.”

Leonie Lane: Nanna

Lane  was a partner in Redback Graphix and worked with Antart in Sydney before returning to the Northern Rivers in the early 1990s. Her commissions have ranged from community art projects and public awareness campaigns to museum, music, film and theatre promotions. Much of Lane’s work reflects her fascination with water – she travelled by canoe down her local river on numerous missions to capture every change in landscape for her Masters, and in much of her water-based there is a sense of water as both friend and foe. She too is retiring from fulltime work and together with Stewart the pair collaborate as Booyong Design.

For the next few weekends John Stewart Ceramics is holding a pre-Christmas sale at the studio:

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