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12 March - 15 April
CONSTRUCTED CLAY The potential of handbuilding to 'move out of symmetry' into quite new areas of expression was what attracted the late Ewen Henderson to clay construction at Camberwell in the mid 1960's. For him it could relate - at its best - to some of the qualities of early art, 'to powerful things which are beyond time'. But of course he was not the first to tap its more elemental dynamic. Like Ian Godfrey he was an important intermediary figure, who took up the reins of a tradition forged by potters as diverse as Gordon Baldwin, Ian Auld and Ruth Duckworth in the l950's. They were part of an emerging group that also looked outside the history of clay for their ideas - to early sculpture and ethnographic art, to the avant-garde in London, Paris and New York. Michael Casson's largely forgotten compilation Pottery in Britain Today (1967) was one of the first books to give handbuilders their due. The range of style and technique included was extraordinary, from Dan Arbeid's ethereal attenuated porcelain bottles to the totemic early pieces of Baldwin. And yet, oddly, with the impact made by the Royal College generation in the early seventies and their subsequent promotion, it was if the liberating legacy of the post-war Central School, Institute of Education and later, of Camberwell, was being marginalized by selective memory. Nevertheless this rich aesthetic, call it 'organic' as some have, does survive in a quietly exploratory but no less penetrating body of work being made today. Ian Auld continued to produce his bold richly textured slab-building into the mid-seventies - until teaching commitments prevailed - and returned to ceramics only intermittently. However his wife Gillian Lowndes was to move away from the vessel to much broader considerations. Clay would become, by the late seventies, just one component in a fertile and playful assemblage of materials, bound and transmogrified by the firing into increasingly preternatural forms. Gordon Baldwin and Ewen Henderson have proved as difficult to pin down. Both have, in their contrasting ways, fathomed the closed form, opened it up and turned it inside out. Baldwin's abstract flight went on to circumnavigate the limitless connotations of the vessel, while Henderson's 'collages in space', of great intricacy by the late eighties, were always paralleled by a continually evolving cycle of teabowls. How different was Ian Godfrey, whose exceptional knowledge of the great museums (as well as the treasures to be found in London markets) fed the inimitable magic of his firmament, realised in an exquisitely carved population of mystical and whimsical objects, full of ritual. Many pieces here share a meditative and highly distilled approach to material and form - first explored in this context by Arbeid and Auld some forty-five years ago. Others have expanded their ideas into structures of real complexity. But also evident is the transformative potential of clay - and its ability to invoke the patina of memory, of things seen and felt. Elspeth Owen's pots have this sense of place. She is a profoundly poetic maker, whose very tactile work monitors a particular course of experience, but also, through an attentive use of colour and texture, mirrors the changing fabric of nature. From the next generation, Jennifer Lee's work is obviously comparable, but it has its own condensed clarity, a language of symmetry and asymmetry that seems to respond to the various residues of history as well as the spacial densities of colour-fields found in modern abstraction. Ian Auld continued to produce his bold richly textured slab-building into the mid-seventies - until teaching commitments prevailed - and returned to ceramics only intermittently. However his wife Gillian Lowndes was to move away from the vessel to much broader considerations. Clay would become, by the late seventies, just one component in a fertile and playful assemblage of materials, bound and transmogrified by the firing into increasingly preternatural forms. Gordon Baldwin and Ewen Henderson have proved as difficult to pin down. Both have, in their contrasting ways, fathomed the closed form, opened it up and turned it inside out. Baldwin's abstract flight went on to circumnavigate the limitless connotations of the vessel, while Henderson's 'collages in space', of great intricacy by the late eighties, were always paralleled by a continually evolving cycle of teabowls. How different was Ian Godfrey, whose exceptional knowledge of the great museums (as well as the treasures to be found in London markets) fed the inimitable magic of his firmament, realised in an exquisitely carved population of mystical and whimsical objects, full of ritual. The radically honed-down sculpture of Sara Radstone has an almost archaic presence. Like Lowndes she has moved away from the vessel, but in her case it is to an ever more concentrated - and haunting - art of search and resolution. It has a hierarchic quality, a sense of oblique symbolic system, that relates to the explorations of Annie Turner. A contemporary of Radstone's, it is only quite recently that she has turned to the riverscape of her Suffolk home for her archaeology of ladders, sinkers, spoons and meander bowls - densely accreted with meaning. Turner has created her own tidal vocabulary - touchstones of continuity and guidance from a watery past. The vestigial passage of time, its actions and imprints, is another common theme, but above all here we experience the powerful suggestiveness of clay; the release of its expressive potency through an especially intimate level of conception and dialogue. These artists have travelled beyond the superficiality of 'style' - to something that goes much deeper, is far more intense. David Whiting
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