Townsville’s Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery has a long history with ceramics, most significantly the North Queensland Ceramic Awards. So, a collection of rare fine bone Wedgwood china, along with contemporary inflections on the brand by globally celebrated designers, is not then such a stretch for this regional gallery.
Stepping into the space, viewers are funnelled through a softer version of blockbuster signage and ticketing – you could be forgiven for feeling as if you’re entering an exhibition at one of our state galleries. Townsville joins the successful model of the regional ticketed blockbuster, established by Bendigo Art Gallery (Vic), which has repeatedly demonstrated that people will travel if the show is right.
Is this show right? Coming from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, it is almost impossible to get wrong. This exhibition is not only exclusive to Townsville, but is a world premiere for the V&A, which hopes to continue to tour the exhibition for the next couple of years. Hats off to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery’s Director Holly Arden who, through sheer determination and a cold email to the V&A, has pulled off this incredible exhibition. It has been 10 years in the planning by the V&A, so it is a real coup.
Walking in, the Gallery feels transformed. Custom-built museums cases have a yesteryear feel to them, but are exquisitely adapted for storytelling in our time – and this place. Each uses a graphic design in ‘Wedgwood blue’ on the display surface that connects the narratives to Townsville – a fragment of a map, for example, landing the pieces here in this location. It is a subtle and beautiful touch. The lighting is honed and the didactic minimal. Arden says they were channelling a Tiffany’s jewellery hall feel, working with Speculative Architecture to design the audience experience.
The exhibition is not the first extensive look at Wedgwood in Australia. The David Roche Foundation in Adelaide presented Wedgwood: Master Potter to the Universe in 2023 – the difference being these pieces were all drawn from Australian collections.
Apart from being curated by the V&A, another exciting point of difference is how this exhibition tracks the company into the present day and how it continues to inspire radical design. This is the focus of the upstairs galleries in Townsville. They have been designed with a long central shop-like display case with a landscape of pedestals displaying slick pots alongside, for example, a pair of shoes with a Wedgwood heel, jewellery by Wendy Ramshaw (1980s) and modern-styled functional ware by New Zealand designer Keith Murray (1930s).
A standout piece demonstrating that spirit to give free rein to artists is a vase by fashion designer Charles Jeffrey (Loverboy) from 2023. Known for his subversive and gender-inclusive creative narrative, Jeffrey has used pre-loved Jasperware pieces individually decorated in his distinctive graffiti-like graphic style.
Other collaborations included in the upper gallery are with Vera Wang, Peter Blake, Lee Broom, Robert Dawson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Edmund de Waal, among others. It reinstates Wedgwood as a contemporary creative hub for artists, welcoming mavericks and thought leaders to express themselves freely, in step with founder Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) from some 200 years earlier. This is why the exhibition has been deliberately titled Wedgwood: Artists and Industry. The Gallery explains: “The company invited artists to treat its ceramic wares as a blank canvas, rejecting the distinction between the fine and applied arts.”
We don’t always think of Wedgwood as radical. But Josiah Wedgwood was an incredible innovator and entrepreneur. For example, he originated so many things we take for granted today, such as offering a money-back guarantee, celebrity endorsement, direct mail marketing and illustrated catalogues (one of which is in the exhibition). Plus, he was the first potter to accurately measure kiln temperature – his award-winning 1783 pyrometer was scaled in ‘degrees Wedgwood’. Visitors get to see one in this exhibition, along with his hand-annotated ‘experimentation books’ for testing techniques.
These objects, along with a glaze sample tile for Wedgwood’s iconic Jasperware from the 1770s, one of Josiah Wedgwood’s early pattern books (1810-14) and a travelling sales book from circa 1815, are presented in the lower gallery cases.
A key work, and testament to that drive for innovation, is a Trial relief for Wedgwood’s copy of the Portland Vase (circa 1789) in black Jasper clay. The piece’s surface is covered in blisters. The Portland Vase is an ancient glass vase in the British Museum, and Wedgwood spent four years trying to recreate it. The exhibition also includes a first edition of the vase in the Gallery’s former bank-vault viewing space. This is a wonderful rare inclusion.
Other highlights include the First Day’s Vase, one of only four existing pieces to have been personally hand-thrown by Josiah Wedgwood in 1769, marking the opening of the new factory Etruria Works in Stoke-on-Trent.
Josiah Wedgwood was not just a creative innovator and entrepreneur, but also a man who sought to embrace the modern world. A really sensitive pairing of two medals illustrates this: one is the Sydney Cove medallion (1790-95) in Jasperware and the other is one of Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallions from around the same time.
Made originally in clay that was collected from Sydney Cove by Captain Arthur Phillip when delivering ‘settlers’ to the new colony, it has a relief image of the Classical muse Hope encouraging Art, Labour and Peace in guiding the founding of the new colony. But, curiously, Wedgwood was also a member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and he distributed, free of charge, popular protest medals in the Jasperware style, worn as fashion accessories. Their slogan ‘Am I not a friend and a brother’ did more than any pamphlet in supporting the cause.
This complexity continues to be narrated across over 100 objects in the exhibition – from the sublime to the ‘truly bonkers’, such as a lobster salad bowl and a Jasperware Egyptian god. Visitors can witness the way the company moved with the times, with designs influenced by Egyptomania, Asian ceramics, the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco and Modernism.
Read: Exhibition review: Frida Kahlo: In her own image, Bendigo Art Gallery
The Gallery’s space has been painted, picking up the company signature’s glaze palette and stylistic transitions to give an overall immersion in ‘Wedgwood world’. This is an extremely nuanced narrative of a company with a seismic impact. But the thing I love about it most, is that it is totally surprising. We can be wowed by history on the one hand, geeked out by technique on another, and then be inspired by new designs of our own times that pull the rug out on all perceptions.
This exhibition is an incredible coup, and it delivers on this rare opportunity in spades.
Wedgwood: Artists and Industry will be at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, North Queensland until 24 August 2025. A Wedgwood Symposium will be presented on Saturday 14 June.
Ticketed $5-$30.
The writer travelled to Townsville as a guest of Townsville City Council.
