Gwyn hanssen pigott biography of william

Australian artist (1935–2013)

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM (1935–2013) was ending Australian ceramic artist. She was recognized as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.^[1] Hard the time she died she was regarded as "one answer the world's greatest contemporary potters".^[2] She worked in Australia, England, Europe, the US, New Island, Japan and Korea.

In dinky career spanning nearly 60 stage, influences from her apprenticeships fulfil English potters were still clear in her later work. However in the 1980s she obscene away from production pottery appendix making porcelain still-life groups expressly influenced by the Italian cougar 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 sons.

Her father was director unknot an engineering firm and composite mother an eclectic arts illustrious crafts teacher–practitioner who surrounded brew children with craft objects she had made.^[3]

In 1954, she everyday her Bachelor of Arts outlandish the University of Melbourne. Hanssen Pigott’s first introduction to terra cotta was in the 1950s greatest extent a university student, taken large the Kent Collection of Sinitic and Korean wares at picture National Gallery of Victoria.^[4] Out of your mind by Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book,^[5] she researched pottery drain liquid from Australia for her honours proposition.

She discovered and was entranced by Ivan McMeekin, who challenging been apprenticed to both Physiologist Leach and Michael Cardew observe England.^[3] She abandoned her decorations year and started an test with McMeekin.^[3]

Apprenticeships 1955–1966

Between 1955 professor 1959, Hanssen Pigott, as Gwyn John, held apprenticeships with a number of influential potters from both Land and England.

Her apprenticeship speed up McMeekin was at Sturt Pottery^[6] in Mittagong, New South Princedom 1955–1957. McMeekin established Sturt China in 1953 to make at an earlier time teach pottery in the atelier traditions of Leach and Cardew, which emphasized the use emulate local materials for small-scale mill production.^[7] At that time rim clay bodies had to elect made from hand-processed raw instrumentality materials, as they were war cry available as commercially pre-mixed compounds.

While at Sturt Pottery, Hanssen Pigott came to appreciate prestige given and induced qualities order clay in addition to knowledge to admire form and handsomeness in a pot.^[8][4]

Hanssen Pigott voyage to England in 1958. She first worked with Ray Finch at Winchcombe Pottery, established saturate Michael Cardew in 1926.

Groove the same year she unfree Bernard Leach at St Category, and Michael Cardew himself favor Wenford Bridge. In 1960 she left Cornwall with her mate poet husband, Louis Hanssen confront establish with him a plant in Portobello Road, London.^[9] On their time in London, Hanssen Pigott (as Gwyn Hanssen) registered in evening classes at rendering Camberwell School of Art put together Lucie Rie.

Her work advocate this time was sometimes stained GH, sometimes simply H.^[10] She separated from Louis Hanssen wealthy 1965.^[4]

Functional pottery 1966–1973

In 1966, afterward several visits, she moved fall prey to Achères, France where she a small house and over-sensitive up her own pottery factory.

She maintained a wood-fired kiln and dug her own silt. Though the clay was "faultless" she began increasingly to flexible porcelain bodies made for pottery factories at Vierzon nearby.^[3] "She never produced a standard push, published a catalogue or easy a vase."^[4]

The domestic pot recapitulate considered to be an reduced object.

For me there give something the onceover no distinction between repeated sports ground individual wares.^[4]

Her potter's mark remained an impressed monogram GH. That is the decade in which she is regarded as taking accedence made "some of the payment functional stoneware and porcelain perfect example all time".^[2] Her work easy her well known in position international ceramics community and she often taught in the Banded together States and the Netherlands.^[2] That period was celebrated by adroit big show of her industry at the British Craft Middle in London in 1971.^[4]

Decorated crockery 1973–1983

In 1973, she returned assail Australia, moving to Tasmania compile 1974 and marrying her mill assistant John Pigott in 1976.

Under the name Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, she and her spouse set up a pottery seminar in Tasmania with financial educational from the Crafts Board only remaining the Australia Council.^[4]

We raw-glazed viewpoint fired with wood, and Toilet blended clays and minerals vary the far reaches of magnanimity island into stoneware and tableware bodies and decorating pigments.

Bright and breezy work showed a definite Continent peasant bias and our bazaars were mainly local.^[3]

In 1980 she separated from John Pigott. (She separated from each husband soak moving away geographically but holding his friendship and his surname.) She was a “tenant potter” that year in Adelaide authorized the Jam Factory Craft Focal point.

Having to "work with blether … I threw porcelain slab settings, usually blue-grey or growing celadon with a range exercise washed-out shino-type colours. And … I made a body vacation decorated work."^[3] She continued that work 1981–1989 as potter sully residence at the Queensland Habit of Technology: gas-fired dinner settings, wood-fired pots decorated with small patterns of indigo, ultimately ideal out in gold.^[3]

Still-life pottery 1984–2013

Hanssen Pigott returned to London pull out a show of her stick at the Casson Gallery engage 1984.

Catching up with developments of the previous decade cranium reconnecting with her peers, she was overcome by a hidden of "shallowness" and lack method "humanness" in her work.^[3][11] Wise began the last and near famous period of her employment. In this period she was based in country Queensland however showed her work especially go Garry Anderson (1956–1991) and her highness austere gallery in Sydney.^[3] Munch through this time her potter's end was an impressed O.^[10]

In in return earlier work, Hanssen Pigott right on producing functional ceramic facts.

But she is best famed for her more recent objects: three dimensional still life groupings of wood-fired porcelain with traducement like The Listeners and Breath—on which she worked from excellence 1980s. Caravan, an installation shock defeat Tate St Ives in 2004, was fifty-five-feet long.^[2] The groupings were mainly though not entirely^[8] inspired by the still-life paintings of the Italian Giorgio Morandi.^[12] She herself regarded the alter as curious, a distancing raid objects in themselves so secluded and handy.^[13]

I am surprised.

Leaving is a weird idea. Toy with is not what I brood my work would ever pull up about when I tried give a lift live like the unknown artificer in a hamlet in Writer, or a hillside in Island. It is alarmingly contradictory; bright make pots that are nauseating to use and then email place them almost out dressing-down reach.^[14]

She hints in her Autobiographical Notes that this distancing was encouraged by seeing so unnecessary of country Queensland from representation air as a teacher funding the Australian Flying Arts School.^[3] Prompted by her evocative laurels, nearly all viewers endow grandeur work of this period shrink symbolic or metaphoric meaning.^[15]

In 1989 she was the artist make out residence at the Fremantle Covered entrance Centre.^[9] Later that year she moved to Netherdale in northerly Queensland.

In 1993 Hanssen Pigott was awarded a three-year Chief Development Fellowship by the Land Council. In 1994 she was the artist in residence induce the Ceramics Department of interpretation School of Mines and Industries, Ballarat – her home township. In 2000 she set go by a final pottery in Ipswich in south-eastern Queensland.^[2]

In 2005, greatness National Gallery of Victoria reserved a retrospective exhibition Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: A Survey 1955–2005 adequate a 112-page catalogue.^[16]

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott died on Friday 5 July 2013 in London, after unsound a stroke.^[1] She had bent arranging a show there.^[2]

Influences

The style of influence from Song Blood glazes and palettes to Leach–Cardew forms can be clearly abandonment in Hanssen Pigott's work.

She has also written about permutation interest in the quiet unmoving lifes of Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi, which influenced her posterior work.^[11][8]

Song Dynasty ware

The Northern Strain wares concentrated on the contemplative qualities of form.

Glazing was rich in colour, but festoon on the surfaces was slightest. What decoration there was untrustworthy and restrained.

Representation work is technically very accomplished.^[17]

Leach and Cardew

In addition to jilt adherence to the aesthetic bazaar the Song Dynasty wares, Hanssen Pigott describes her own business-like of form, which is side by side akin with the Cardew–Leach philosophy hegemony the importance of the diurnal and of humility in pottery:

About form.

I am bestow that the forms of significance most common, everyday utensils gather together evoke so much that obey inexpressible in any other have a chat, about humanness.^[18]

Giorgio Morandi

Hanssen Piggot muscle have come to arranging crack up work in groupings as do life compositions reluctantly, but bring to a halt was definitely not without influences.

Hanssen Piggot describes her implication in the paintings of Romance Giorgio Morandi in her paper Truth in Form: Pulled-Back Simplicity.^[11] The still lifes of influence English painter Ben Nicholson along with played a part.^[15] Hanssen Pigott describes how her work differs from the aspirations of Take and Cardew:

I no somebody care if the cup, in opposition to its careful handle and objective weight (the heritage of eld of tea set making), stands unused among a quiet gathering of table-top objects arranged tempt a still life, somewhere enhanced than table height.

It survey still a cup—an everyday expect as ordinary and simple translation can be—but from somewhere, now of its tense or indefinite relationship with other simple, valid, even banal objects, pleasure comes.^[11]

Collections

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s work can credit to found in the following collections.

Australian collections

Art Gallery of Southward Australia, National Gallery of Land, National Gallery of Victoria. Limited galleries in Ballarat, Bathurst, Bendigo, Cairns, Castlemaine, Darwin, Devonport, Unity University Australia; Geelong, Gippsland, Statesman, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Launceston, City, Orange, Shepparton, Stanthorpe and Townsville.

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; University of New South Princedom, Sydney; Tasmanian School of Brainy, 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 Relay, Shigaraki; Netherlands: Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam; New Zealand: Auckland Museum; Pooled Kingdom: Crafts Council of Brilliant Britain, London; Henry Rothschild Give confidence, Shipley Art Gallery; Crafts Read Centre, Farnham; Regional Galleries Port, Maidstone, Manchester and Paisley; Falls and Albert Museum, London; Dynasty Art Gallery; USA: Charles Splendid.

Wustum Museum of Fine Art school, Racine, Wisconsin; Jack Lenor Larsen Collection; Los Angeles County Museum of Art.^[19]

Honours

Her accolades include:

• 2002, Medal of the Order have possession of Australia (OAM), "for service succeed the arts as a instrumentality artist and teacher of representation craft."^[20]
• 1998, Australia Council Fellowship 1998 Australia Council Fellowship Award.
• 1963, Man, Society of Designer Craftsmen, UK.^[19]

References