Word: hanssen
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...sense of serenity that not even the booming chorus of All You Need Is Love from the '60s British art show downstairs can shatter. Displayed along glass cabinets usually reserved for sacred scroll paintings are mere pots of wood-fired clay. But through the alchemy of her kiln, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott has lent these objects a heavenly aura. Before your eyes, her luminous glazes seem to fade to white; porcelain lips quiver. When two Buddhist monks enter the room, they are drawn to the pieces like moths to a flame, which is hardly surprising. If Tasmania's Les Blakebrough...
...decades ago, the potter began arranging her bowls, beakers and bottles along window ledges - airing them, so to speak, where their pure forms could be worshiped by the eye - and an artist was born. But despite the loftiness of her achievements - Hanssen Pigott is considered one of the world's best ceramic artists - the beauty of this exhibition is in showing the earthiness of her inspiration. Born in the Victorian goldmining town of Ballarat in 1935, this daughter of an engineer and craft teacher naturally, it seems, sought salvation from the ground. As an apprentice to Ivan McMeekin...
...student of fine arts at the University of Melbourne, Hanssen Pigott was required to make pilgrimages to the rooms of European painting at the NGV, but this "very young 19-year-old in a dirndl skirt," as she later wrote, preferred the road less traveled. En route she would find herself spending hours with the gallery's collections of ancient Chinese and Korean ceramics. In the green celadon glaze of a Koryo Dynasty bowl or the elliptical lid of a Song court vessel, she found pieces of perfection - and the source of her art. It's a discovery wonderfully echoed...
...Hanssen Pigott's craft reaches back to the Chinese courts of a millennium ago, her sensibility remains modern. No matter how exquisite, form follows function, and in the course of filling the show, the curator has left many a kitchen cupboard bare. Until recently, a prized bowl owned by Hanssen Pigott's sister was used daily for rhubarb. "The usefulness of her pots is very important to her," explains Smith, "and even the works in the still life groups today could be used if people wished to do so; but people tend not to want to use a cup that...
...powerful onlookers vexed. The mess is coming to light as FBI director Robert Mueller continues to try to prove that the bureau's handling of intelligence has been fixed since he took the helm following the agency's pre-Sept. 11 missteps and the jailing of superspy Robert Hanssen. The arrest last month of FBI analyst Leandro Aragoncillo raises doubts about the effectiveness of reforms put in place after Hanssen sold secrets from FBI computers to Russia. Aragoncillo, who previously worked in the offices of Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney, is suspected of taking classified documents from...