page_title: Ian Sprague
section_title: Pottery
hierarchical_section_title: Ian Sprague / Pottery
caption_attribution_description: English: Tenmoku lidded jar by Ian Sprague; photographed in a private collection at Enfield Victoria
context_page_description: Ian Broun Sprague was an Australian twentieth century studio potter, ceramic sculptor and graphic artist. Delayed by the Second World War and a false start in architecture, he spent his forties adapting Australian domestic pottery to a Japanese aesthetic of contemplative use; his fifties as a sculptor in two and three dimensional pottery; his sixties and seventies making landscape works on paper.
context_section_description: Sprague attended the London Central School of Arts and Crafts 1958–1960. He spent two months at the David Leach pottery in Devon. He returned to Australia in February 1962, planning to make ethical pots in the Anglo–Japanese tradition founded by Bernard Leach, David's father. Sprague bought a 15-acre estate in Upper Beaconsfield, Victoria.
  I had this whole setup clearly in mind. I wanted to live out of Melbourne. I wanted to have animals, some land, and to be completely free to do what I wanted.
  On the estate he set up a pottery, designed and built a new house nearby and renovated an existing five-room cottage. From England he had imported a Homer kiln capable of the high temperatures needed to make stoneware and porcelain rather than earthenware, and a Boulton's cone-driven wheel and pugmill. The equipment was on a commercial scale but devoted to studio work. The pottery was called Mungeribar: "red clay" in the local Aboriginal (Woiwurrung) language.
  … we finally arrived at a stoneware body mixing a local fireclay with commercial red clay, china clay and ball clay … it works well and reduces to a red-brown with lighter speckling … Most of the glazes we use are, as a result, in the darker earthy colours but speckled light greys and ochres are also possible.
  The Mungeribar Pottery's mark is a Macdonald's em impressed; Sprague's personal mark is a capital I over a horizontal separator and the Morse code for S—three dots. Some pots are signed "IanS". Drawings and paintings are signed "Ian Sprague"; work signed simply "Sprague" is generally by his nephew Leslie.
  Sprague had met and liked the potter and Slade School technician Robin Welch (b. 1936) in England. He paid for Welch and his family to come to Mungeribar in 1962 so Welch could help him set up a fully professional pottery. The Welches returned to England in 1965. In the October 1965 issue of Pottery in Australia, Sprague described their successes and failures in setting up the pottery. The description and plans are so detailed as to amount to a specification for would-be imitators. Sprague produced a full range of functional domestic pottery from 1964 to 1980.
  In 1964 he established the Craft Centre in South Yarra, "a display centre and exhibition gallery for Australia's highest standard craft work". Sprague thus had control of every step of production from mixing the clay to passing wrapped pots over the counter. The Centre was owned and stocked entirely by him, and he travelled all over Australia in search of the best pottery, textiles, glassware, woodwork and jewellery. The opening exhibition showed the pottery of Robin Welch. Sprague sold the Centre in 1967, but soon started a campaign for a government funded centre, eventually established as the Meat Market Craft Centre in North Melbourne.
  In 1971 Sprague became president of the recently established Craft Association of Victoria. Dismayed by the quality of teaching in art schools and technical colleges, he ran many workshops around the country on the textural treatment of clay.
  I feel that one should contribute something for the common good, although often a tremendous amount of one's creative work-time is used … Establishing and running a property, collecting paintings by Australian artists, pop and classical records and continually entertaining friends and visitors has not left me enough time for my own work.
caption: Lidded storage jar, Tenmoku glazed; 14cm x 15cm; Ian Sprague mark.
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