Ceramicist's picture-perfect suites

GWYN Hanssen Pigott was an exceptional talent.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott

IN the 1980s, a particularly ill-conceived hybrid art form arose, known as ceramic sculpture, embraced largely by women and supported by an ill-digested mixture of theories about craft, folk art and feminism.

The products of this movement - which had nothing to do with Tanagra statuettes, Tang horses or Quattrocento portrait busts - varied from faux-naif whimsy to ideological kitsch, but they were almost uniformly dreadful. At the time, however, they were promoted as the contemporary incarnation of the ancient art of ceramics.

Amid this cacophony, a few more harmonious voices stood out, but none more clear, confident and convincing than that of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, who died a few days ago in London at the age of 77. The ultimate source of her strength and confidence was the mastery of the potter's craft, at the heart of which is wheel-throwing, that subtle, difficult and magical process by which a lump of clay turns into a vessel, and matter becomes form and idea at the touch of the artist's hand.

Like all modern potters, Hanssen Pigott's craft was inspired by Bernard Leach, with whom she worked for a time, and the ideas and values expounded in A Potter's Book (1940), the most important source for 20th-century artistic ceramics. Leach's rediscovery of the Chinese potter tradition, which reached its highest expression in the works of the Sung and Yuan dynasties, was not antiquarian in spirit but profoundly modernist in its concern with the authenticity of materials and the rediscovery of the fundamental principles of technical process.

Together with other distinguished Australian members of the new potters' movement, Hanssen Pigott combined the use of local materials and small-scale manufacturing in a wood-fired kiln - at various times in Britain, France and Australia - with a reinterpretation of the highly refined Chinese language of forms and glazes. Accordingly, all her pieces are vessels and nothing better reveals the way that power can arise from submission to a tradition, or that rigorous humility can be the highest expression of ambition, for in the very simplicity of these shapes lies their potential for eloquence.

Bottles, cups, bowls, covered boxes, all utilitarian and usable objects, also and for that very reason have archetypal associations so powerful that the artist has only to lengthen or shorten a neck or to turn a lip inwards or outwards to suggest longing, reticence, generosity or timidity. Light and dark, warm and cool glazes on internal or external surfaces could add a counterpoint of formal and expressive suggestion to any vessel.

Nor did Hanssen Pigott confine herself to traditional Sung forms. In the late 80s she also began to adapt certain more general forms, such as the bottle, which exists in so many varieties from antiquity to the present across the Eurasian continent, or the French cafe-au-lait bowl, itself an adaptation of a classic Chinese design. And she conceived the idea of presenting her vessels in little sets or suites - a couple of bottles with a bowl and a covered dish, for example - which at once set up a play of formal relations between tall and short, narrow and wide, closed and open.

The inspiration for these suites, as she herself admitted, came from the quiet and meditative pictures of Giorgio Morandi, the greatest of modern still-life painters. Of course the idea of presenting ceramic objects as though they were a still life is something of a conceit, and perhaps above all an admission that we do not really use the works of a potter of her supreme ability in the way that such vessels might still be used in China, Japan or South Korea - in the drinking of tea, for example.

We are most probably going to set them out on a shelf, and no doubt that is our loss. But under those circumstances Hanssen Pigott's choice was an inspired one, not only because it helped to focus the attention of collectors and gallery curators, who suddenly recognised the work as art when it looked like a picture, but above all because her arrangements arise out of the particular silent eloquence with which she has endowed the works.