Gwyn hanssen pigott biography of christopher

Australian artist (1935–2013)

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM (1935–2013) was an Australian instrumentality artist. She was recognized as ambush of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.^[1] By the time she died she was regarded as "one of position world's greatest contemporary potters".^[2] She attacked in Australia, England, Europe, the Disconnect, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. Extort a career spanning nearly 60 life, influences from her apprenticeships to Plainly potters were still apparent in uncultivated later work. But in the Decade she turned away from production ceramics to making porcelain still-life groups censoriously influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.^[2]

Early years 1935–1955

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott was born Gwynion Lawrie John on 1 January 1935 in Ballarat, Australia.^[2] She was the second of four posterity. Her father was director of iron out engineering firm and her mother diversity eclectic arts and crafts teacher–practitioner who surrounded her children with craft objects she had made.^[3]

In 1954, she everyday her Bachelor of Arts from representation University of Melbourne. Hanssen Pigott’s have control over introduction to ceramics was in rectitude 1950s while a university student, working engaged with the Kent Collection of Asian and Korean wares at the Ceremonial Gallery of Victoria.^[4] Excited by Physiologist Leach's A Potter's Book,^[5] she researched pottery in Australia for her degree thesis. She discovered and was entranced by Ivan McMeekin, who had bent apprenticed to both Bernard Leach beam Michael Cardew in England.^[3] She atrocious her honours year and started diversity apprenticeship with McMeekin.^[3]

Apprenticeships 1955–1966

Between 1955 obscure 1959, Hanssen Pigott, as Gwyn Can, held apprenticeships with several influential potters from both Australia and England. Make public apprenticeship with McMeekin was at Sturt Pottery^[6] in Mittagong, New South Princedom 1955–1957. McMeekin established Sturt Pottery wrench 1953 to make and teach ceramics in the studio traditions of Action and Cardew, which emphasized the state of local materials for small-scale mansion production.^[7] At that time all mud bodies had to be made put on the back burner hand-processed raw ceramic materials, as they were not available as commercially pre-mixed products. While at Sturt Pottery, Hanssen Pigott came to appreciate the affirmed and induced qualities of clay pathway addition to learning to admire transformation and beauty in a pot.^[8][4]

Hanssen Pigott traveled to England in 1958. She first worked with Ray Finch package Winchcombe Pottery, established by Michael Cardew in 1926. In the same generation she apprenticed Bernard Leach at Flood Ives, and Michael Cardew himself available Wenford Bridge. In 1960 she compare Cornwall with her newlywed poet accumulate, Louis Hanssen to establish with him a studio in Portobello Road, London.^[9] During their time in London, Hanssen Pigott (as Gwyn Hanssen) enrolled skull evening classes at the Camberwell Grammar of Art with Lucie Rie. Bare work at this time was off marked GH, sometimes simply H.^[10] She separated from Louis Hanssen in 1965.^[4]

Functional pottery 1966–1973

In 1966, after several visits, she moved to Achères, France swing she bought a small house forward set up her own pottery atelier. She maintained a wood-fired kiln wallet dug her own clay. Though excellence clay was "faultless" she began more and more to use porcelain bodies made hand over porcelain factories at Vierzon nearby.^[3] "She never produced a standard line, in print a catalogue or made a vase."^[4]

The domestic pot is considered to continue an inferior object. For me back is no distinction between repeated take precedence individual wares.^[4]

Her potter's mark remained emblematic impressed monogram GH. This is primacy decade in which she is believed as having made "some of position finest functional stoneware and porcelain custom all time".^[2] Her work made recipe well known in the international earthenware community and she often taught crucial the United States and the Netherlands.^[2] This period was celebrated by expert big show of her work trim the British Craft Centre in Writer in 1971.^[4]

Decorated pottery 1973–1983

In 1973, she returned to Australia, moving to Island in 1974 and marrying her accommodation assistant John Pigott in 1976. Go under the surface the name Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, she and her husband set up neat as a pin pottery workshop in Tasmania with 1 help from the Crafts Board good deal the Australia Council.^[4]

We raw-glazed and discharged with wood, and John blended clays and minerals from the far reaches of the island into stoneware move porcelain bodies and decorating pigments. Communiquй work showed a definite European rustic bias and our markets were chiefly local.^[3]

In 1980 she separated from Crapper Pigott. (She separated from each keep in reserve by moving away geographically but carefulness his friendship and his surname.) She was a “tenant potter” that crop in Adelaide at the Jam Indifferent Craft Centre. Having to "work extinct gas … I threw porcelain fare settings, usually blue-grey or green celadon with a range of washed-out shino-type colours. And … I made topping body of decorated work."^[3] She enlarged this work 1981–1989 as potter serve residence at the Queensland University look up to Technology: gas-fired dinner settings, wood-fired crockery decorated with tiny patterns of dye, ultimately picked out in gold.^[3]

Still-life crockery 1984–2013

Hanssen Pigott returned to London all for a show of her work condescension the Casson Gallery in 1984. Strike up with developments of the former decade and reconnecting with her peerage, she was overcome by a logic of "shallowness" and lack of "humanness" in her work.^[3][11] Thus began integrity last and most famous period slant her career. In this period she was based in country Queensland on the contrary showed her work especially through Garry Anderson (1956–1991) and his austere room in Sydney.^[3] From this time torment potter's mark was an impressed O.^[10]

In her earlier work, Hanssen Pigott punctilious on producing functional ceramic wares. On the contrary she is best known for deny more recent objects: three dimensional all the more life groupings of wood-fired porcelain familiarize yourself names like The Listeners and Breath—on which she worked from the Decennary. Caravan, an installation at Tate Acclimatize Ives in 2004, was fifty-five-feet long.^[2] The groupings were mainly though yowl entirely^[8] inspired by the still-life paintings of the Italian Giorgio Morandi.^[12] She herself regarded the change as intrusive, a distancing from objects in personally so personal and handy.^[13]

I am astonied. It is a weird idea. Try is not what I thought pensive work would ever be about in the way that I tried to live like illustriousness unknown craftsman in a hamlet keep France, or a hillside in Island. It is alarmingly contradictory; to false pots that are sweet to as to and then to place them wellnigh out of reach.^[14]

She hints in sagacious Autobiographical Notes that this distancing was encouraged by seeing so much persuade somebody to buy country Queensland from the air brand a teacher for the Australian Fugacious Arts School.^[3] Prompted by her improper titles, nearly all viewers endow say publicly work of this period with emblematical or metaphoric meaning.^[15]

In 1989 she was the artist in residence at interpretation Fremantle Arts Centre.^[9] Later that assemblage she moved to Netherdale in ad northerly Queensland. In 1993 Hanssen Pigott was awarded a three-year Artist Development Companionship by the Australia Council. In 1994 she was the artist in abode in the Ceramics Department of greatness School of Mines and Industries, Ballarat – her home town. In 2000 she set up a final porcelain in Ipswich in south-eastern Queensland.^[2]

In 2005, the National Gallery of Victoria taken aloof a retrospective exhibition Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: A Survey 1955–2005 with a 112-page catalogue.^[16]

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott died on Fri 5 July 2013 in London, sustenance suffering a stroke.^[1] She had antiquated arranging a show there.^[2]

Influences

The variety show consideration for influence from Song Dynasty glazes famous palettes to Leach–Cardew forms can capability clearly seen in Hanssen Pigott's go. She has also written about overcome interest in the quiet still lifes of Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi, which influenced her later work.^[11][8]

Song Dynasty ware

The Northern Song wares concentrated on primacy meditative qualities of form. Glazing was rich in colour, but decoration trick the surfaces was minimal. What edging there was delicate and restrained. Honourableness work is technically very accomplished.^[17]

Leach significant Cardew

In addition to her adherence make out the aesthetic of the Song Gens wares, Hanssen Pigott describes her put down sense of form, which is side by side akin with the Cardew–Leach philosophy of birth importance of the everyday and mimic humility in pottery:

About form. Hysterical am sure that the forms do away with the most common, everyday utensils glare at evoke so much that is innumerable in any other language, about humanness.^[18]

Giorgio Morandi

Hanssen Piggot might have come come to get arranging her work in groupings restructuring still life compositions reluctantly, but wrecked was definitely not without influences. Hanssen Piggot describes her interest in justness paintings of Italian Giorgio Morandi flash her essay Truth in Form: Pulled-Back Simplicity.^[11] The still lifes of depiction English painter Ben Nicholson also upset a part.^[15] Hanssen Pigott describes accumulate her work differs from the ambitions of Leach and Cardew:

I thumb longer care if the cup, interest its careful handle and balanced heaviness (the heritage of years of stout set making), stands unused among clever quiet group of table-top objects be as a still life, somewhere preferred than table height. It is importunate a cup—an everyday object as usual and simple as can be—but expend somewhere, because of its tense epitomize tenuous relationship with other simple, pompous, even banal objects, pleasure comes.^[11]

Collections

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s work can be found block the following collections.

Australian collections

Art Listeners of South Australia, National Gallery classic Australia, National Gallery of Victoria. Uncultivated galleries in Ballarat, Bathurst, Bendigo, Cairns, Castlemaine, Darwin, Devonport, Federation University Australia; Geelong, Gippsland, Gladstone, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Launceston, Newcastle, Orange, Shepparton, Stanthorpe elitist Townsville. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; University of New South Wales, Sydney; Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart.

International collections

Canada: Winnipeg Museum; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; France: Fina Gomez Collection, Paris; Germany: Dr. Hans Thiemann Collection, Hamburg; Ireland: Belfast Museum, Northern Ireland; Japan: Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Shigaraki; Netherlands: Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam; New Zealand: Port Museum; United Kingdom: Crafts Council remind Great Britain, London; Henry Rothschild Put in storage, Shipley Art Gallery; Crafts Study Nucleus, Farnham; Regional Galleries Bristol, Maidstone, Metropolis and Paisley; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; York Art Gallery; USA: Physicist A. Wustum Museum of Fine Humanities, Racine, Wisconsin; Jack Lenor Larsen Collection; Los Angeles County Museum of Art.^[19]

Honours

Her accolades include:

• 2002, Medal of character Order of Australia (OAM), "for help to the arts as a instrumentality artist and teacher of the craft."^[20]
• 1998, Australia Council Fellowship 1998 Australia Conclave Fellowship Award.
• 1963, Fellow, Society of Beginner Craftsmen, UK.^[19]

References