My Fergus Stewart pot

This year’s AusBonsai Market held at Auburn Japanese Garden was great. My deep gratitude to the organizers. I was just curious about what’s new and one stall selling bonsai pots immediately got my attention. The first thoughts that came to my mind were wood-fired ceramics by a highly skilled potter, but not a career bonsai pot maker. All pots were on the larger side, round, skilfully thrown on a potter’s wheel. Some of them were about a meter in diameter! You have to be a potter to appreciate that. I had to know who the potter is and the stall owner was too happy to tell the story. A Scottish ceramic artist Fergus Stewart with a passion for wood-fired ceramics worked in Australia between 1981 and 2002. Around 1999 while working at the Strathnairn Ceramics Workshop in Canberra, Fergus Stewart was commissioned by a Canberra bonsai grower John Remmel to make a series of bonsai pots. The examples of pot shapes and glazes given by Remmel were illustrations from “Matsudaira Mame Bonsai Collection Album” published in 1975. Stewart had to develop several glazes to match the illustrations in the album. Most pots had either a chop mark “FS” or signed “Stewart”. It turns out that the lot of them was never used and ended up for sale in this year’s bonsai market. Many of the pots had no feet and looked more like your typical English handmade functional stoneware rather than bonsai containers. Perhaps this was the reason why this stall was largely ignored by the market crowd. It’s a shame because they are a product of great craftsmanship and would work with certain trees. Nevertheless, in some instances Stewart did manage to capture the essence of a bonsai pot and I simply could not resist buying one of those (see image below, round 6 x 40 cm).

By the way, Fergus Stewart is currently teaching ceramics and works in Lochinver, Scotland specializing in wood-fired and salt-glazed ceramics. It doesn’t look like he is making any bonsai pots these days.