Plate 1948

Carl Cooper began making pottery in the 1940s after contracting polio and losing the use of his legs. He lived near the Murrumbeena home and pottery studio of the Boyd family, AMB Pottery, and forged friendships with Merric, David and Arthur Boyd. They provided him with access to a top-opening kiln designed by Henry Hatton Beck, which was reasonably easy to operate from a wheelchair. During this period, Cooper received encouragement from Edith Macmillan, who sold his works through her Primrose Pottery Shop. His ceramics frequently drew on Indigenous Australian motifs, which he applied to his own pieces and to ‘blanks’ supplied by the Boyds. This plate is thus unusual within Cooper’s oeuvre in respect to both colour and design. In the mid 1940s, Arthur Boyd painted a portrait of Cooper — now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra — whom Boyd described as ‘dissatisfied, fierce [and] crushed’, qualities that are not reflected in Cooper’s work.