Peter Rushforth

This exhibition forms part of the Gallery’s long term program of exhibitions and publications intended to provide a systematic documentation of the history of Australian studio pottery.

Australian studio ceramics came of age steadily through the 1950s and early 1960s. Peter Rushforth was one of the principal figures in that movement and the National Gallery of Victoria is pleased and privileged to present a full-scale retrospective of his work as part of a continuing series of exhibitions documenting the history of Australian studio pottery.

The individual personalities of leading Australian potters are known to relatively few followers of the movement. A retrospective exhibition presents the opportunity to show the peculiar quirks of an individual potter’s development. Peter Rushforth’s retrospective reveals two distinctive patterns: first, his fine and educated sensibility as a potter and secondly, a desire to let the work’s expressive qualities unfold in the process of making. Some of the great guiding influences on contemporary pottery–notably the Japanese tradition are to be found in his work but none of these influences dominate to the exclusion of his own distinctive personality. There is something endemically Australian about his work; its roughness, vigour and feeling for natural forms.

Extract from Peter Rushforth: Retrospective Exhibition, NGV 1985