One of Pippin Drysdale’s ‘Boab’ pots sits on my desk at
home, the delicate tracery barely able to contain its
swelling form. Each morning I look deep into the maroon
void of it’s interior and activate its bell-like tone
by tapping the top rim. As I work I look over at its elegant
poise as it hovers like a dancer and follow the seismic
ripples that run over the surface. It is both a meditative
and a perplexing experience.
Confronting Pippin Drysdale’s pots is fraught with difficulty.
Should you keep your distance and take in the relationships
of the various forms, should you move closer in to examine
the intricate tracery of lines or is it permissible to
loose yourself in those wonderful voids that lure you
over their fine rim into a world of intense colour? There
is also the desire to touch and know the form more intimately
measured against their delicate balancing act and the
thought they might topple over. Somewhere between these
polarities of seduction and restraint we find our point
of contact.
For the past quarter century Drysdale has been refining
her forms, her materials and her language to create a
unique body of work that is responsive to the landscapes
of Australia. Although an urban artist she seeks out places
that have a special character or resonance, like the Tanami
Desert in central northern Western Australia or the Kimberley
Region in the northwest of the State. Once absorbed the
colours, sounds, patterns and ambience of the site are
carried back to the studio where she patiently re-creates
their ‘hum’ and ‘echo’ in the delicate web of glazes etched
into the surfaces of her elegantly shaped forms - lines
of sight, of smell, taste and memory.
Although these lines and forms seem arbitrary and abstract
there is a remarkable similarity between the rows of dunes
blown into long striations by the wind or the stratified
rocks laid down over millennia. Back in the studio the
thin lines, sometimes anxious, often flowing, occasionally
broken, wrap around, enveloping and defining the simplified
ceramic form developed in collaboration with her throwing
partner Warrick Palmateer. They are vessels refined to
a truncated pod-like form balancing on a small base with
lightness and poise. The shape is a carefully wrought
synthesis, the result of many hours of deliberation in
the studio informed by her empathy with the landscape,
that carries information about many aspects of the landscape.
Working from her studio in the port city of Fremantle,
surrounded by the catalogue of her trials and failures,
racks of wonderful pots of all colours and sizes that
failed her exhausting test of quality, she summons up
the character of those magical places in these beautiful
forms. Firstly choosing the shapes thrown by Palmateer,
then adding the layers of glaze and carefully cutting
away with a scalpel through a masking resist to inscribe
the tracery that defines and shapes each work. None is
similar, each has its own temperament and each speaks
with a characteristic cadence and intonation.
Some works set up a dialogue with the desert, others with
native flora, still others with the dramatic gorges and
chasms that lance down into the earth. They both describe
and evoke in a play between representation and abstraction
that is never fully resolved, remaining a fluid choice
for each new player drawn into their orbit.
For these viewers another dialogue develops, this one
interspersed with silences, creating a space for contemplation
and meditation. It is the silence of awe and also of recognition
that there is something extraordinary, literally breath
taking in front of you, something that needs time before
you can fully register its subtlety. This dance with the
works takes some time, it is different for each viewer,
but then the moment of balance occurs and secrets are
revealed.
‘There
are so many subtleties to that womb-like interior, to
getting it right and to maintaining that sense of containment
and tension’
Pippin
Drysdale, ‘A Commitment to Clay’ 2003
One
of the marvellous secrets in each work is the hollow void
saturated in colour that provides an inner radiance, both
mesmerising and seductive. In the Boab series that orange
glow is so intense it seems to create another light source
with the room. In contrast to the mesh of white lines
cut into the black skin of the pot it looks ready to detonate,
its containment only temporary, the form just strong enough
to hold it in, the four forms together looking like reactors
whose core might soon explode. The swirling interplay
of surface decoration and shape heightening the sense
of imminent melt down, the moire patterns of shifting
lines making it difficult to fix the image of the group.
Although her individual vessels when shown together suggest
relationships this grouping of forms is relatively new,
the close proximity of each setting up new tensions, suggesting
new dynamics that give the Boab series an extra charge.
The Boab Adansonia gregorii, indigenous to the Kimberley
region of North Western Australia, is a large spreading
tree with branches that radiate from the top of the swollen
barrel trunk that soaks up and holds water. The tree is
a source of nourishment and sustenance in a harsh environment,
also providing food in large woody capsule-like nuts.
In Drysdale’s pots the promise within is evoked by the
rich orange interiors while the etched surfaces echo the
tradition of Indigenous Australians who decorated the
nuts and used them as items of exchange. There is also
the resonance of the name captured in the relationship
of the forms like a hollow play between two drums and
so much more.
Similarly in Spinifex she evokes the colour and soft,
blurred forms of the desert grass found in the sandy soil
of Central Australia. Growing in a ball shape, its sharp
and thin leaves sprouting outwards, the plants when dislodges
roll over the landscape propelled by the wind. Something
of that erratic tumbling is captured in the lines Drysdale
maps around the vessel while the soft grey green colour
shifts and blushes in sections just as the rolling balls
of grass allow the red earth to bleed through as they
move relentlessly across the landscape.
The northwest of Western Australia is a remarkable environment
it’s harsh and cruel terrain occasionally providing respite
in a gorge or fissure in its dry surface where water collects
or bubbles up. In these oases the water is clear and fresh,
flowing out and over rocks of the richest red ochre, creating
a stinging contrast of colour so intense it is quite literally
shocking. In Chasm- MacDonnell Ranges the flow of blue
lines around the red form mimics that contrast while the
unfathomable void of the blue recreates the depth and
intensity of the water pools, so welcome after hours of
travel across dry terrain.
One of the most dramatic features of that northwest Kimberley
landscape is the Bungle Bungle Ranges, an extraordinary
grouping of ochre and black striped mounds, encased in
a skin of silica and algae, that rise up to 600 metres
about sea level and spread over the land for kilometers.
They are like a huge series of Drysdale’s pots, upended
and dispersing toward the horizon. Her own Bungle Bungle
1 Kununarra vessel encapsulates that sense of inevitable
and unstoppable replication, moving out in waves, her
stripes both defining the looping hills and rolling in
and through them.
Pippin Drysdale’s latest body of work continues her journey
through the landscapes of Western Australia. The seven
‘Earth Drawing’ pots on show at CO[ ]ECT 2005[1]
at the V&A in London explore the visual traces of
the wind, of the processes of sedimentary deposit, of
weathering and erosion. In ‘Earth Drawing 04’ the subtle
bleed of the lines echoes the leaching of salt while the
soft pulse of colour around the form contrasts with the
dramatic reverberation of the extraordinary pink interior
that glows like a James Turrell installation. You can
almost hear the wind whistling across the surface of the
land and smell the astringent aroma of saltbush. Each
vessel takes as its inspiration a site, a place, or a
visual experience and documents a deeply felt resonance
with the land. Through her articulate language of line
and colour she delineates each form and saturates each
sonorous interior to offer us new insights about the environment
and open up a space for this dialogue with the landscape
to unfold.
Ted Snell is Professor of Contemporary
Art, and Dean of Art at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin
University of Technology. He is currently art reviewer
for The Australian in Western Australia and a regular
contributor to ABC radio and to several national journals.
He is also the author of several books on Australian art
and curator of numerous exhibitions.
1
Her exhibition as part of COLLECT
2005 was organized by the Marianne Heller Gallery, Heidelberg,
and ran from the 12 - 17 January in the Exhibition Galleries
at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, South
Kensington, London, SW7 2RL