Owen Rye (1944- ) was born in Cooma, NSW, and has led an intensely varied and stimulating life as a leading woodfirer, teacher, researcher, writer, and now sculptor. He studied industrial arts at the University of New South Wales, completing his undergraduate degree in 1965 and a PhD in 1970 in which he investigated the use of Australian raw materials in the development of porcelain bodies and glazes. From 1970-1975, funded by the Smithsonian Institute, he studied traditional potters and glassmakers of Pakistan and Israel, publishing a number of works that are still in use in archaeological ceramic classes today. From 1976-1980, he worked in the Department of Prehistory (Institute of Advanced Studies) at the Australian National University, then taught ceramics at Canberra School of Art before becoming a lecturer in the School of Visual Arts, Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education, in Churchill, Victoria, in 1985. Seven years later, the Gippsland Institute was incorporated into Monash University as its Gippsland Campus. As Senior Lecturer and Head of the Ceramics Studio there, Rye developed a distance education course for teaching postgraduate ceramics. In 2003, when he retired to focus on his own work at Boolarra South in Gippsland, Victoria, fifty of his graduates celebrated his achievements with an exhibition at Mura Clay gallery in Newtown, Sydney. Work may be signed with a painted 'OSR' and he also used an impressed Chinese character for a while. Recently he has been using stamps of his initials or surname and he also uses marks in glaze experiments to identify the glaze.
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