Much in Common, Nothing Alike

“Landscape, landscape, landscape . . .”

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Much in Common, Nothing Alike celebrates the immense contribution of three Australian ceramic artists, Pippin Drysdale, Jeffery Mincham AM and Warrick Palmateer.

Landscape, landscape, and landscape are the common threads for these three doyens of the Australian and international ceramic world. From there, they are indeed “Nothing Alike”!

For the first time in twelve years, Mincham is showing a range of new works in the West, some over seventy centimetres high, such as his hand-built ceramic piece A Summer Spent, An Autumn to Reflect, 2022, down to five or six of his small, highly sought-after Tea Bowls. Here, he expresses his personal language through mid-fired textural ceramics, hand-coiled, and frequently imposing in scale, the vehicles for his evocative interpretation of landscape in the Adelaide Hills, mostly experienced from his Cherryville studio and the adjacent Fleurieu Peninsula, where he grew up on the edge of The Coorong.

Mincham finds abstraction intriguing, “almost irresistible,” with inspiration for his work sourced from the landscape and natural world. Wild at Heart, 2023, continues his investigation of the Japanese Oribe ware ceramic tradition. In the 1600s, the Japanese were thinking about tea bowls in ways that relate to our contemporary view of abstract expressionism, re-ordering visual experiences and turning them into something else, something entirely new. This is precisely what Mincham presents, something “entirely new,” in form and shape.

A practising potter for over thirty-five years, Palmateer shared the stage with Drysdale in their major survey exhibition, Confluence, at the John Curtin Gallery in 2018. His vessels in Confluence were gargantuan in scale, formed from brick clay mined in the Perth Hills, referencing his coastal home, weathered limestone, coral reefs, and the ever-changing tides. In 2023, with his new studio nearing completion, Palmateer is again turning to the rhythm, movement, and textures of the Western Australian coastline for inspiration. “I have always regarded myself as a wheel thrower, so my new work is based on wheel throwing and the qualities of the ocean and coast, the light, shade and movement of beach and water that has defined me from an early age.”

Collaboration has been an integral part of Palmateer’s artistic practice, throwing Drysdale’s minimalist porcelain vessels and marbles for over thirty years. Drysdale has been a remarkable figure in Australian ceramic art for over four decades, working from her Fremantle studio with a collaborative team, especially Palmateer. Her works intuitively, driven by her passion to create. She draws on assimilated experiences of place, topography, remote communities, changing light, flora or fauna, that give rise to her abstract interpretations. Her ceramics are frequently reflections of the famous Kimberley and Pilbara regions, many echoing the “vastness” of place while others explore the “smallness” of things. Memories are key, and they run deep. She neither sketches nor photographs her travels, relying rather on emotions, on almost sub-conscious recollections that surface spontaneously to channel her vision.

“Much of my work is about creating dialogues between the land that inspires me, the people who have and will continue to care for it and those who seek to exploit it,” says Drysdale. “Coloured glazes, incised lines, applied to my porcelain (Devils) marbles and vessels, are my tools to capture the magnificent beauty of remote Australia’s unique environment, the changing hues of the six seasons and to highlight the threats they face. These fears will be sure to influence my work into my next decade, symbolising the unspoiled treasures of our landscape and my prayer that they will not be destroyed.”

 

Margaret Jeffery BA (Wits) is Curator at Linton & Kay Galleries, Western Australia.

Linton & Kay Galleries Subiaco
26 May to 11 June 2023
Western Australia