Pottery at Old Toolijooa School
A cottage-industry workshop producing hand-made stoneware pottery, chiefly domestic ware, but including decorative items, small animals, garden dragons etc, all made on the premises. Built on the site of the old Toolijooa school, long since closed, several kilometres along the highway south of Gerringong village, surrounded on all sides by dairy fields. Depending on the day, visitors may see pots being made, or glazed or fired. No need to buy, maybe just browse around in the display room and see the wide variety of pots on show. Open all day every day, since they live and work here. It’s a pleasant drive this way, but if you want to be sure they’re home maybe phone ahead.
About us
It’s only a small scale “cottage industry” venture, operating since 1988. We began with a small electric kiln (6 cubic feet), bought in a burnt-out state and rebuilt from the ground up. Some years later we built a larger gas-fired fibre kiln (27 cubic feet), and later still a smaller test kiln (2 cubic feet). And eventually, a wood-fired kiln too.
Who makes the pots? Just two of us, man and wife. Not a lot of qualifications as potters go… four years at Tech College, part time (and it was fun, too). But countless thousands of pots made and sold since then. We’re both getting older and slower now, but we try to keep up.
Potting takes place in a separate workshop building, about 100 square metres floor area, adjacent to the old School residence. We think of it as a workshop rather than a “studio”. Three pottery wheels, pugmills, slab roller, extruders, various kilns and all the usual hardware. Lots of shelves. One end of the building is separated off as a display room. We don’t often think of it as a “gallery”. We fire an occasional batch of terracotta items, but most of the work is stoneware, fired to cone 9 or 10.
Opening the kiln door after a new firing is rather like opening a Christmas present. Some pots probably better than expected, others not so good.
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