From another perspective, Pippin Drysdale makes pots that celebrate their functions as containers and their surfaces as carriers of colour and pattern.

Her highly refined recent works, all bowls, are quintessential metaphors of the female form as the giver, while their decorated surfaces capture the open horizons and colours of the Australian landscape.

These detailed painterly lines and stipples in oranges, ochres, yellows and gentle luster may represent dry soils, or else they could perhaps depict the striations of native tree trunks, or simply the abstracted impressions of long distant horizons.

Drysdale’s linear, gestural markings enhance the purity and warmth of the minimalist forms of the vessels, which, in their presentation as groups, evoke central desert monoliths and landscapes.

“My Pinnacle series are formal objects, which exploit the bowl’s ability to convey dualities – to contain oppositions.The subtle shifts in colour in the groupings mirror the subtleties of hue to be found in the Western Australian interior.”

These Pinnacle series are yet another successful departure from Drysdale’s previously accomplished decorative work, demonstrating her ability to combine form with surface to produce ceramic work of considerable elegance.