Pippin Drysdale

Pippin Drysdale: mapping the landscape

Over the last quarter century Pippin has been refining her forms, her materials and her colour palette to create a unique body of work that is a response to various landscapes. Although an urban artist, she seeks out places that have a special character or resonance, such as the Tanami Desert in central northern Western Australia or the Hunsa Valley at the end of the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan. Once she has absorbed the site, she carries its colours, patterns and ambience back to the studio, where she patiently re-creates their glow and echo in the delicate web of glazes etched into and brushed onto the surfaces of her elegantly shaped forms.  

The process of analysis, review and revision continues until she is convinced she has captured the character of each new place. The thin, tense lines, sometimes relaxed, often flowing, occasionally broken, trace the shadow gaps between the rows of dunes blown into long scarification’s by the wind or the stratified rocks laid down over millennia, the rows of Spinifex woven through the desert or the meandering tracks of reptiles cut into the red dirt. Sometimes she combines them with broadly brushed colour, emulating the explosion of spring, an approaching storm, the red dust sunsets of Pakistan, or with rich gold lustres evoking the riches below the surface in the eastern goldfields.

The richness of the surface of the Tanami works is the point of immediate contact, the lure and first attraction, it is the play between the void of colour glimpsed over the horizon line of the lip and the complex surface that makes these works exceptional. The interior gradation down to a deeply resonant base is hypnotic and literally breathtaking. These pools of intense colour are moments of absolute calm, a point of slippage into another dimension of thought and existence, where the considerations of everyday activity are left behind. It is impossible not to be moved, deeply moved, elated and calmed by this experience. The sonorous colours seem to come from another place, a place where everything is pitched at a heightened sense reality, so deep and luxuriant that it literally invades your being.

The Kimberley Series is a group of works based on the artist’s experience of travelling in the northwest region of Western Australia. The northwest has been lodged in Pippin Drysdale’s psyche since her first visit while still a teenager in 1958, when she sailed on the MV Kanimbla to visit Millstream Station, a property owned by the family of a school friend. The landscape, its people, the dramatic change of seasons and the remarkable geological structures were imprinted on her brain. A trip back to the region in 1998 ignited those memories and linked them to the mature vision of an artist. Over the following decade, she has explored ways in which this imagery might inform her work. However, the confluence of ideas and the opportunity to work on a major new project resulted in a new group of closed forms that investigates the Kimberley landscape anew.

The process of distilling visual ideas to encapsulate the unique qualities of the topography, the flora, and the changing nature of the atmosphere from day to night and summer through to winter is a long and arduous process. It begins with the development of new forms. This is a collaborative process involving Warrick Palmateer, a skilled thrower who makes all her vessels. Under her direction, Palmateer creates the shapes and refines them when leather hard to ensure they have exactly the right lift from the ground. Each form is carefully considered in relation to others already made and groupings develop into rounded landscapes that stretch out on the shelves ready for the first bisque firing and glazing.

Generating a palette of colours and orchestrating the linear treatment of the surface is an extraordinarily laborious process that is fraught with risk and littered with kiln failures. Master technician Mike Kusnik developed the glaze she uses, and over the years she has gained great skill in manipulated the recipe to give her the colours and surface qualities she needs, but this is never guaranteed. Each new work is an experiment as colour is laid down, lines are cut with laser precision using a blade and more colour is added back into the fine crevices. So much can go wrong in the kiln and so much cannot be predicted with certainty. Sometimes the pots crack, sometimes the expected colours fail to materialise and the hours of work that went into the careful cutting and glazing results in a disaster, instantly relegated to the garden or the bin. Her standards are high, very high, and many of those rejects sitting forlornly under the lemon tree are gems, flawed though they are. And sometimes magic happens and through the alchemy of fire, clay, glass and lead extraordinary things emerge.

There are numerous triggers that initiate the development of new forms and new approaches to surface decoration. Most obviously it is through contact with a place and its people. Pip met the Indigenous artist Queenie McKenzie at the Warmun Community in the East Kimberley just a few months before her death. Drysdale sat with McKenzie while she completed one of her dry ochre paintings depicting the rocky protrusions, rolling hills and Boabs of her country. She later bought the painting of tall domed hills to hang in her kitchen. That work has been joined by others by Indigenous artists, including a magical painting by Kitty Kantilla, the revered artist from the Tiwi Islands. The influence of their work is evident in both the Tanami Series produced from 2001 and the current Kimberley Series. Her reference to the works of these artists is an act of homage just as artists from across cultures and over centuries have always done: a nod in the direction of their mentors and an acknowledgement of their achievements.

Drysdale absorbs all these influences and combines them with her memories and experiences of the landscape, such as her 1998 trip to Purnululu. Purnululu is the name given by the Kija people to the sandstone area of the Bungle Bungle Range. Rising as high as 578 metres above sea level, the extraordinary linear striping of the domes is due to the differences in clay content and porosity of the sandstone layers. The shapes prevalent throughout the Range are like inverted versions of the vessel forms she had been exploring for the past twenty years and are the main catalysts for her new work.

There is something very elegant, gravity defying and poised about her earlier series based on the vessel. Those works have a lively spring, an awe-inspiring lightness and there is the added frisson of their delicate balancing act that gives them a presence that sustains long engagement. The vessel also offers the promise of the interior, that wonderful coloured void into which we fall after circumnavigating the complex linearity of the exterior surface. So why change? The risk of moving into new territory is one of the great addictions of the creative artist, knowing you could loose everything and just possibly gain the world. It’s a gamble, like the stock market, a calculated risk certainly, but a risk nevertheless that it will all collapse into nothing. What greater attraction could there be!

To upend the vessel is then a radical act but one the artist had to try. It was a step over the brink that revealed many new possibilities. Immediately the form became non-functional, the void could no longer be accessed, the colour it contains – necessary to keep it stable – no longer visible. The closed form became an object amongst other objects, one that must survive by its own wits, create its own reason to exist, and seek out friends. Although singular works have great dignity they require others to lend support and to tell bigger, more expansive stories.

On the benches in her studio these ‘tablescapes’ grew as pots were drawn from the kiln, still warm and fresh with a new blush of colour. Moving from bench to bench the diversity and richness of her response amassed into a vast panorama of geological, botanical and meteorological complexity. Each grouping captured an aspect of the Kimberley landscape, some through nuances of colour and others through a linear extrapolation that flowed over their gently doming forms. They describe the topography of anthills, mountain ranges, tumbling tracts of spinifex and rocky protuberances that spring from the red desert soil. This is the Kimberley, or Pippin Drysdale’s Kimberley, in all its intricate convolutions of form, line, colour and texture, but there was one last facet of the project remaining.

The next radical move was to reintroduce the vessel form into the groups of closed forms, and something new and magical happened again. Curve against counter-curve, one arching rising shape locked to the ground by it’s neighbour, one form opening up to lure the viewer into it’s seductive core while others remained resolutely impenetrable. The play of incised lines around every form also establishes a rhythmic wave that draws the eye through and around the installation, replicating the movement through the landscape, as our eye follows strata layers, fault lines and the ripples of a sand dune or Spinifex row. These groupings are full of surprises, just like the landscape she describes, and they are breathtakingly beautiful objects.

Drysdale is an exceptional artist, a fact acknowledged by the Craft Council of Australia who nominated her as a ‘Master of Australian Craft’ in 2007, and each pot is wrought with enormous care and great skill to draw out some aspect, to illuminate some quality or identify a particular characteristic of the landscape. She has always pushed at the boundaries of her practice, always sought out new challenges and taken the kind of risks that would daunt most practitioners.

As a result the recent body of works that map the landscape and re-create its topography in tablescapes of rich lustrous colour and sensuous form is one of her greatest achievements, not only because it pushes further into new territory than most of her previous projects, but also because of its extraordinary achievement in translating and re-imagining the specificity of place. The open and closed forms coalesce into a vast panorama that is awe-inspiring in its scope and scale – just like the landscapes of Western Australia.

Professor Ted Snell   AM CitWA                                                           Director, Cultural

Precinct                                                                                                    University of Western Australia

& Chair, Visual Arts Board, Australia Council

Education and Honorifics

2009                  Dept of Cultural Affairs, NY Culture, City of NY, USA

                  Artist in Residence

2008                  Master of Australian Craft, Australia Council for the Arts

1997-date  Adjunct Research Fellow, Curtin University, WA

1986                   BA Fine Arts, Curtin University, WA

Selected Professional Experience

1999                    Cultural exchange and exhibition, Gubbio Italy

1993                    Artist in residence: Banff, Canada                 

1992                    Artist in residence: Canberra School of Art

1991                    Artist in residence: Wales, Italy, Russia and USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions (Over 42 Solo exhibitions 1986-2011)

2011                  Moss Green Gallery, Melbourne, VIC

2010/11                  Mobilia Gallery, Boston USA (T.M 2008/09)

2010                  Galerie Marianne Heller, Germany (T.M II 2010)

2010                  Booker-Lowe Gallery, Houston USA (T.M 2008/09)

2010                    Australian Embassy Washington DC USA (T.M 2008/09)

2009                    Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay Gallery (T.M I 2008)

2008                    V&A, London, COLLECT, (Marianne Heller Gallery)

2007                    Yamaki Gallery, Osaka, Japan

2007                    Marianne Heller Galerie, Germany, 30th Anniversary

2007                    John Curtin Gallery, Retrospective + Lines of Site                 

2006                    Carlin Gallery, Paris

2005                    Anant Gallery, Delhi India

2005/04                    V&A, London, COLLECT Art Fair

2003                    Galerie Marianne Heller, Heidelberg, Germany,

2003                    MAK Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (T.T.S I 2000)

2000                    Quadrivium, Sydney (P.K.S)

1991                    Tomsk Museum, Russia

1991                    Novosirbirsk Museum, Russia

Selected Group Exhibitions (Over 300 Group & Invitational exhibitions 1981-2005)

2010                  Abstract Nature, SAMSTAG Museum, Adelaide, SA

2010                          Tanami Traces/Kimberley Series, (17 works) loan to USA Embassy, Canberra, Australia

2010                  Tanami Mapping 2010, Mobilia Gallery, Boston, USA

2009                  the vessel-the object, Kunstforum Solothurn Galerie,

                  Switzerland

2009/10                  COLLECT, Saatchi London represented by Joanna Bird                   Pottery

2009/10                  SOFA, New York represented by Joanna Bird Pottery

2009                    Melbourne Art Fair, represented by Michael Reid

2007                    Clay & Glass, Puls Galerie, Brussels

2005                    Form, Florence Art Expo, Italy

2005                    Galerie Marianne Heller, Heidelberg Germany

2005                    Transformations, The Australian National Gallery, ACT

2005                     The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Scotland

2005                    Ceramic as Expression, World Ceramic Biennale, Korea

2004/05                    Vessel, Kunstforum Kirchberg Galerie, Switzerland

2004/1998 SOFA Chicago and New York, USA

2004                    Coloured Porcelain, St. Joseph Galerie, Holland

2004                    Masters of the Modern, Munich, Germany

2003                    Recovery for Use, Cheongiu International Biennale, Korea                  2003                    Kanazawa Invitational Exhibition, Japan

2003                    Museum of Modern Art, Gifu, Japan

2002                    Material Culture, The NGA

2002                    Toowoomba Art Gallery Biennial Acquisition

2001                    Centenary of Federation 1901 – 2001, NGA

2000               Australian Contemporary gCeramics, Galerie Marianne Heller, Germany

1999                    Vitalità Perenne del Lustr’o, Palazzo dei Consoli, Italy

1999                    Australian Craft on tour in Japan, Powerhouse Museum

1997           San Francisco International Fair. Craft Australia

1996                    Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award, Auckland, NZ

1995               Delinquent Angel, Museo Internazionale Ceramiche, Faenza

Grants

2007               Fellowship, Australia Council

2006               ArtsWA New Works Grant

2003               ArtsWA Freight & Travel Grant

2002/1997/ArtsWA Travel Grants

1992/1991              

2001               VACB, New work to tour Germany            

1998               ArtsWA Creative Development Fellowship

1997/8               VACB, Project Grant

1994               VACB, Creative Development Grants

1990               VACB, Creative Development Grant

1987               VACB, Special Development Grant

Collections International (most recent)

Major private installation (19 works), Boston, USA acquired 2010

Ralph Lauren Private Collection, (5 works) SOFA NY 2010

The following installations were acquired by

The Duke & Duchess of Devonshire, Chatsworth, Derbyshire:

Sulphur Springs (11 works) acquired 2009

Embers & Ash (16 works) acquired 2009

TTS & Kimberley Series (27 works) acquired 2008

National Museum of Scotland

Marco Polo Corporation, Singapore

MAK Museum, Frankfurt, Germany

Museum of Modern Art, Gifu, Japan

Cheongiu Museum and Art Gallery Korea

21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan

Museo del Ceramica, Faenza, Italy

Palazza del Colsole – Gubbio Italy            

The Grain Pool, Seoul, Korea

Tomsk State Gallery & Museum, Siberia, Russia

Novosirbirsk State Gallery,Siberia, Russia

Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand

American Foundations, USA

The Gifu Prefectural Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Collections Australia (most recent)

Museum and Art Gallery, NT            

National Library Canberra, Australia

Australian National Gallery, ACT

Artbank collection

Art Gallery of WA

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Launceston Art Gallery

Queensland Art Gallery

Newcastle Art Gallery, NSW

The Powerhouse Museum, NSW            

Edith Cowan University, WA

University of WA

Toowoomba University, Qld

Manly Art Gallery, NSW

Campbelltown Art Gallery, NSW

Australian Capital Equity, WA

Bank of New Zealand, WA

ANZ Bank, Vic

Telstra Murdoch Collection, NSW

Private collections throughout Australia

Monograph

Pippin Drysdale ‘Lines of Site’, Ted Snell, Fremantle Arts Press,

2007

Catalogues

Pippin Drysdale :Lines of Site, Towards The Kimberley Series,

Ted Snell, Fremantle Arts Press, 2007

V&A, London, ‘CO[ ]ECT’, 2003 and 2004

The Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu: ‘The Legacy of Modern

Ceramic Art, Part II - Modern