Meet ceramicist Jonathan Hook, the Denmark artist whose pottery is an expression of his love for the landscape

Jonathan Hook’s 50-year career in ceramics has allowed him to immerse himself in, and take inspiration from, the landscapes of the Great Southern that he loves. Hook’s self-built studio and gallery overlooks the lush green hills around Denmark with huge windows bringing him close to nature as he works on the ceramic mugs, bowls and vases he sells out of his adjoining gallery space. The potter’s passion for ceramics was sparked as a child growing up in Mt Barker, after his family moved to the Great Southern town from Victoria when he was six years old. His mother, a member of the Plantagenet Potters and Painters, would bring home bags of clay and her son would use it to hand build ceramics. “I sort of took to it like a duck to water,” he said. He left Mt Barker to attend Year 11 and 12 in Perth in 1970, before deciding to leave high school and study a ceramics course at Perth Technical College. Hook is part of a generation of ceramicists who were taught it as a profession, an approach which faded over the years as the production of ceramics was outsourced from Australia. Though it has regained popularity in recent years, he says it no longer gets taught in the same way. In 1976, Hook returned to his childhood home of the Great Southern, settling in Denmark where he has been based ever since. “I came here to absorb the landscape,” he said. “I just loved the beauty of the place, the beauty of Denmark.” Hook says he uses his art to “express this landscape into an artistic form”. His relationship with the natural environment was more than just a process of taking inspiration from it. “Because I live here, I’ve been thinking about it for 50 years,” he said. “So it’s what you might call an osmotic process, you hope that you’ll absorb the landscape into your subconscious I guess and it permeates, it comes out.” One of the main motifs that Hook is using in his recent work is inspired by native pea flowers. “The structure of plants here is just fascinating,” he said. Hook generally works in a cycle of about six weeks that takes him from throwing about 80 mugs or 60 bowls each day, to the final piece taken out of the big kilns in his studio. He says his process is more like a wood turner’s process than that of a traditional ceramicist. “I’m not a traditional potter as such,” he said. “I actually finish my work, I clean it back and then it becomes more like a turning process, a lathing process — like a woodturner or a metal lathe and machinist. It’s a very similar process, strange as that may sound, because once the clay dries it becomes a firm shape. “And you can turn it, you can cut it, you can make it very smooth. You can make it rough, you can texture it, you can do a lot of things.” Although he has now worked with ceramics for half a century, he still finds challenges in the ancient medium. “Ceramics is a 5000-year-old craft, so it’s all been done before, somewhere,” he said. “Somebody’s scratched, hit, pummelled...so you’re just taking old techniques and giving them a modern twist, bringing them through into our current age, so it’s always changing. It’s amazing how you can actually transform an old idea into something new, or give it a more contemporary look.” Hook designed and built his studio himself almost four years ago on a property he has been living on for 42 years, taking inspiration for the design from the Stirling Range. His goal for the new studio is to allow him to “expand more into artistic expression” through sculptural work and painting. The studio is open every day and forms part of the 2022 Southern Art and Craft Trail. “I want to paint, that’s my sort of ultimate goal, to be painter or a print maker as well as doing ceramics,” Hook said. Whatever medium he works in, he will always focus on using his art to depict the scenery of the Great Southern that he loves so much and looks out on every day from his studio. “An expression of this landscape, basically, is where my life’s endeavour is going,” he said.