Loopline Pottery

At Balmoral Village in the NSW Southern Highlands, a former railway-era schoolhouse holds one of the country's more idiosyncratic pottery practices. Steve Harrison, who studied at the National Art School before spending time learning in Japan, China and Korea, has spent close to fifty years perfecting single-stone sericite porcelain, digging clay-forming rock from the geology around Mittagong and the Joadja Valley rather than buying commercial clay bodies. His wood kilns use a low-smoke Bourry-box firebox of his own design, a technical sideline that grew into a separate kiln-building business, Hot and Sticky, run with his partner of fifty years, Janine King. Harrison's work carries an impressed 'SH' mark and has built a following among wood-firing potters internationally for its restraint and material honesty. The Old School studio opens to visitors during the Southern Highlands Arts Trail each November, and Harrison remains an active teacher and kiln consultant into his seventies, recently working as artist-in-residence in Korea studying traditional moon jar forms alongside his own low-emission firing methods.