Word: pigott
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...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...
...What she was in fact circling was the work of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). With monk-like devotion, Morandi spent a lifetime honing the still life, grouping bottles and cups into quiet meditations on solitude and society. Hanssen Pigott had seen his 1972 retrospective in Paris, admiring his "geometry tempered by poetry," and in the following decade an Italianate bottle emerged citadel-like from her kiln. She called the piece Thinking of Morandi. Over time her vessels grew into simpler shapes, the space between their groupings often as important as the objects themselves. In this way, a producer...
...asylum seekers). Other still-life groups simply delight in their play of form (the rising and falling rhythm of Breath, 2000) and color (the enlightening journey of Fade, 2003). Her groups, which the artist keeps carefully documented in photographs, are growing. In 2004, for instance, Hanssen Pigott placed ten trails of 20-odd vessels in a display that curved along a beach in Cornwall, England, with sand, surf and ceramics commingling. Sadly, Caravan hasn't made it into the present show, but The Beatles have. Which is in the end perhaps appropriate, for these chamber pieces of perfection, together...