Rowley Drysdale

A property at Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast hinterland has grown, over three decades, into a small ceramics campus: several studios, a scatter of anagama and gas-fired kilns, artist accommodation among the gardens, and a gallery that looks out over water. Rowley Drysdale began working clay at twenty and has spent more than thirty years teaching the craft, at Sunshine Coast TAFE and later at the University of Canberra, while building a body of work that pairs wood-fired ceramics with painted timber boards soaked in pigment washes before oxides and paint are worked into the surface. He has picked up more than twenty awards along the way, including the Peter Voulkos Medal and Ceramic Arts Queensland's Siliceous Award, and his pieces sit in public collections as far afield as Japan, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom. As president of the Australian Wood Firers' Union since 2019, he has become something of an elder statesman for a fairly niche, labour-intensive branch of the craft. Quixotica, as the property is known, runs workshops and exhibitions through the year and takes part in the Sunshine Coast's open studio events, making a genuinely significant regional practice easy enough to walk straight into.