Art of craft

Scoop Homes & Art #29, Winter 2011
Scoop Publishing | 30 Aug 2010

Bela Kotai is recognised as one of Western Australia’s Master Craftsmen. He’s been invited to exhibit at one of the world’s leading sculpture events in Chicago and is highly regarded nationally. However, this artisan will never stop evolving and pushing the boundaries of his craft.

The son of a pioneering ceramicist, Bela spent most of his formative years preparing clay and firing the kiln in his father’s Fremantle studio. While those tasks were rarely embraced with bright-eyed enthusiasm (he was a teenager of the 60s after all), the knowledge he gained from being immersed in the craft has nevertheless underpinned his own extraordinary impact on studio ceramics today.   

Starting out as a production potter, at a time when there was a greater demand for hand-crafted coffee mugs and casseroles, Bela’s career in ceramic art has included 40-plus years of solo and group exhibitions.

He gained Master Craftsman accreditation from the WA Crafts Council in 1977; has works represented in the Stokes Collection, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the High Court of Australia; and has exhibited at the prestigious Chicago International New Art Forms Exposition (now SOFA), which celebrates the world’s best in sculptural and decorative art.

Bela’s non-functional pots are renowned for their elegance, their simplicity and their sheer size – attributes not commonly seen in such contemplative stonework. And yet somehow he pushes the mark, seducing the viewer’s eye with his smooth, organic forms and intriguing lines. 

“Art for me has always been about feeling,” he says. “It’s not an intellectual process. I feel it first, then I work through the motions and create it. In my experience, you don’t get to pick and choose where your ideas take you.”

It’s this organic sensibility that’s earned the humble 63-year-old a place as one of the country’s most innovative ceramicists.

Robert Cook, curator at the Art Gallery of WA, praises Bela’s work for blurring the line between ceramics and sculpture. “One of the things that has been significant about his long-standing contribution to the field is the way his vessels assert themselves,” he says. “Seemingly, not content to deal with the cool pleasures of the meditative thrown form, Bela’s work is strong, dynamic, bold and, of course, absolutely impossible to ignore.”

“His sculptures are exceptionally unique in that they’re large, technically perfect clay forms,” adds Cher Shackleton, president of the Ceramic Arts Association of WA. “I find they dramatically change from exhibition to exhibition as well – it’s always evolving and getting better. That’s really inspiring on both a human and artistic level.”

According to Bela, this drive to continually improve his art and never subscribe to a failsafe formula is one that stems from his father, Francis.

“My father had this notion that art isn’t really worth anything unless it’s different and better than the last time you did it,” Bela says. “That really resonated with me – more than anything else I think.” 

Having trained as a sculptor in Budapest between the world wars, Francis was influenced by the highly decorative and functional qualities of traditional European ceramics. As a frequent exhibitor at the Hungarian National Gallery, it wasn’t long before he had established himself as an internationally regarded potter.  

In 1946, when the Iron Curtain in his country began to fall, Francis and his family fled Hungary and migrated to Western Australia. Acting on a gap in the market for ceramic homewares, he opened a workshop in Bassendean where he would apply many of the techniques he’d learnt back home.

“There was an arousal of interest in pottery at the time centering down at Fremantle,” says Bela. “They asked my dad to start lecturing at the Technical School there, so he moved his studio to the building that is now the Freo Arts Centre.”

While Francis involved all his children in the preparatory work for his classes, it was Bela who took the greatest interest in clay, learning to throw pots on the wheel at age 16. Around this time, his sister Eveline also started showing aptitude as a painter, a talent that she would use to make her own mark on the art world.  

“Looking back, I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in that environment,” says Eveline. “I think we all took it for granted that artistic endeavors were a positive thing to be doing. It wasn’t until I met others trying to do the same that I realised not all families thought this way.”

Four years after the skills were passed on and Francis had semi-retired from teaching, Bela and his father decided to open a studio together in Mount Lawley. But Francis became ill during the process, leaving Bela to finish the project on his own.

“I guess that’s how I got started in ceramics really,” Bela says. “I can’t say I ever felt overly passionate about it – I’ve always struggled enormously to get the motivation to create. But I was proud to be carrying on my father’s legacy and that kept me going.”

Bela had his first ceramics exhibition at his Mount Lawley studio in 1972. Like his father’s work, the pieces were predominantly functional in form, and given their popularity at the time, sold quickly. 

But the more Bela became immersed in his craft, the less interested he was in making pottery for domestic use. The waters were further muddied by the tariff barrier former prime minister Bob Hawke lifted some years later, which resulted in an influx of cheap imported ceramics to the market.  

“I found it difficult abandoning that functional element and making the transition to art,” Bela says. “Sculpture by nature is subjective – you have to have a completely different sensibility for the form than purpose-made pottery.”

But it wasn’t long before his work started to take an abstract turn. Studying design at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin) in the late 1970s, Bela developed an intense preoccupation with the effects of tension on forms and surfaces.

He was particularly interested in the sense of drama tension creates at points of equilibrium, and exemplified his ideas through a series of fully enclosed vessels constrained by ropes of clay.

Cher Shackleton remembers one such piece that was later acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia: “It was this beautiful balloon-shaped figure, banded around the centre and salt glazed, so it looked like it was perspiring from all the pressure. That surface tension he played with was so vivid; you couldn’t help but think the pieces might burst any second.”

Since then, Bela’s ideas have evolved in exciting ways. He’s examined wholesale death in war, marked by crosses and mounds to reflect the battlefield, and more recently the question, ‘If God was a potter, what would he make?’, with a series of rhythmically manipulated exoskeleton forms.

In terms of approach, Bela has also pushed the envelope by using musical structures to formulate his pieces. Because music is intrinsically abstract, he says, it has the unique ability of working directly on the subconscious: “It gets past the initial cognitive defenses, so the listener is forced to respond in an emotional way.

“That’s the kind of effect I want my work to have, which is why I’ve been looking at musical forms like the fugue and the sonata, applying their structures to the way I work.”

This is best seen in his piece Stravinsky, a large, blue ovoid form animated with ribbons of clay. As arts writer Dorothy Erickson observes, the knife-edged protrusions in the work provide sharp contrasts in light and shade, evoking the compositions of Stravinsky himself.

Bela says he is hoping to build on these ideas when he partakes in a 10-week developmental residency at Colorado’s Anderson Ranch Arts Centre from February 2011. “I’m thinking about creating these multi-piece formats, so rather than having a single structure on its own, there might be ten grouped together which read like a composition. The idea is that as you walk through this installation, it gives you a transitional experience – just like music.”

Given his passion for the craft and willingness to manipulate clay in meaningful ways, it’s no surprise to learn that Bela – like his father – has also shown a huge commitment to arts education in WA. 

On completing his university studies in 1979, Bela took a job teaching ceramics in Kalgoorlie and has continued to lecture since then to fund his artistic pursuits.

“It’s always been the bread and butter for my art,” he says. “I’ve always exhibited and I’ve always thought of myself as an artist. And it’s that attitude that’s enabled me to stay in the game, rather than saying: ‘I’m a teacher now, I’m going to put up my feet’.”

Among some of the more successful students he’s sent out into the world are Helen Foster and Fleur Schell, who have both shaped their own distinct paths as prominent WA ceramicists.

Bela has also served as chair of the WA Ministerial Arts Committee and foundation chair of NETS WA (now Art on the Move), and sat on the Festival of Perth Board and the more recent Arts Development Panel. 

These days, he spends most of his time at the Central Institute of Technology, where he lectures in ceramics and works on his own sculptural creations. He’s completing a collection of critter-like forms to exhibit at his brother’s open garden in September, and in preparation for his Colorado residency, working on more domestic pieces to sell at his sister Eveline’s home studio in December.

“There’s still so much scope for exploration in ceramics,” he says. “And I think as an art form, we’re at a point now where it’s starting to claim territory. Because of its functional origins, ceramics has generally been seen as a lesser art here, but now that’s starting to change. And so it should.”

Joe Pascoe, chief executive officer at Victoria’s prestigious Craft Gallery, believes ceramics – and crafts at large – is starting to get the attention it deserves. “The important intellectualism of the recent two decades had inadvertently camouflaged the inherent strengths of the scene. With the haze clearing, it is apparent that craft media, such as ceramics, have come back, or were perhaps never gone.

“The collector market has some fragile strength, too, with a range of commercial galleries braving their hands to show mature ceramic work. This longevity is possibly related to the long gestation period required to become a major ceramicist like Bela Kotai.”

Adds Cher: “The ceramics scene in Australia owes a lot to Bela. He’s encouraged other potters to be more conceptual with clay. It’s always a delight to see his work and I’m sure he’ll keep surprising us with his inspired methods and captivating designs.”    

Bela is represented by Yallingup Galleries (08) 9755 2372, yallingupgalleries.com.au; and Perth Galleries (08) 9433 4414. See his Open Garden collaboration, September 25 to October 31, at Mountolive Studio Gallery Gardens, 610 Mons Road, Hovea. He will also exhibit at his sister Eveline’s home gallery: WGV at 48 Watkins Street, White Gum Valley, (08) 9336 1397, December 5–12.


Sister act

We speak to Bela’s sister: renowned painter Eveline Kotai

When did you first notice Bela’s potential as a ceramicist?
I noticed he’d been spending more time in Dad’s studio when I was in my late teens (Bela is two years older). The next thing I knew he was throwing pots and making kilns.

How have you seen Bela’s work evolve over the past 30 or 40 years?
 The progression from practical homewares in the early 70s to the dramatic forms of the present was gradual. The earlier work was probably driven by the need to make a living, but served as a firm grounding for future directions.

Are there any similarities between your work and Bela’s?
The only direct similarity I can think of is that we both seem to refer to musical equivalents – though approached from entirely different angles. I’m firmly fixed in the rhythm section, while Bela seems to be tackling the entire symphony.

What do you remember about growing up in your father’s studio?
There are strong memories of the smell of wet clay, the heat from the kilns, watching my father working and mucking around in the dilapidated buildings of what is now the Fremantle Arts Centre. But the strongest memories would be of the arrival home of the fired pots. They’d be carefully arranged on the dining table, still warm, and the melodic ‘pinging’ would go on for days.

What did you love about your father’s work?
The forms are very elegant and the glazes are exquisite – the colours and textures are quite painterly – evocative even. The few that I own still give me much pleasure.

Did you ever dabble in ceramics yourself?
I preferred using clay as a medium for sculpting rather than on a wheel. I probably didn’t have the knack, or the discipline.

What made you pursue painting?
As a child, I enjoyed drawing imaginary people, but it wasn’t until I went to high school and was encouraged by my art teacher Mrs Bruce that I considered taking it further. My parents also encouraged me – my father sent me to a Hungarian painter friend, George Laszlo, for drawing lessons, which I loved.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m about to send off work for a show in Sydney at the Depot Gallery – 2 Danks Street in Waterloo. The paintings and stitch collages are a continuation of my interest in the unfurling of patterns.

Eveline is represented by Perth Galleries (08) 9433 4414. The Dank Street exhibition runs until September 5.