Robert (Bob) Mair (1943- )

A New Zealand potter who trained at the Sturt Pottery in Mittagong under Les Blakebrough and later set up a pottery at Clifton Pugh’s Dunmoochin estate at Cottles Bridge near Melbourne. There he met John Olsen, a fellow resident, and they worked together for two years from 1969-1970, with Mair throwing and Olsen hand-decorating the pots. During the 1970s, he worked at a goldfield production pottery in Ballarat with Robert Pitman before moving to Clarendon in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia in 1982. He turns up in the Sturt Pottery timeline again in the late 1980s/1990s as a visiting potter under Campbell Hegan. In the early 2000s, he and partner Janie Kerr set up a pottery at Braemar in the Southern Highlands of NSW. They then moved, first to Sutton Forest where they took up a residency at Hillview, the former summer residence of the governors of NSW, then to Wingham in the Mid North Coast region of NSW. Mair’s work may be marked with an impressed ‘RM’, an impressed tricuspid symbol or both. In Clarendon, he continued to use the tricuspud symbol with an impressed ‘Old Clarendon Pottery Adelaide’ stamp. We do not yet know what mark Mair used at Ballarat or what mark Janie Kerr used on her hand-crafted and decorated ceramics.  Copyright 2021 Australian Pottery at Bemboka