Head pot

Alex Leckie is probably most famous for being arrested after swimming naked in the River Torrens in 1962, an escapade that led to his dismissal from a teaching post at the South Australian School of Art. Renowned for his distinctive sculptures based on thrown forms, Leckie is credited with having initiated the figurative stoneware tradition in South Australian ceramics. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Leckie’s studio practice didn’t aspire to an East Asian aesthetic, his unrefined surfaces relying on the natural colour of clay and ochres, while their rough, painterly qualities reference European abstraction, particularly the work of Pablo Picasso, who also produced figurative ceramics.

Born in Glasgow in 1932, Leckie studied ceramics at the Glasgow School of Art before moving to Australia as a young man, in 1955. The following year he began teaching at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts, as it was then known.  Head pot dates to this period in his career and features a solemn masculine face hidden within the checkerboard pattern and double cylindrical built form.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design