Pearlescent Semblances, Perfect Parallels – Pippin Drysdale’s The Patterning of Light

Artist Pippin Drysdale is recognised as the “foremost interpreter of the Australian landscape in the field of ceramics,” as the media release for her latest show eloquently phrases it.

Boasting more than 450 exhibitions both in Australia and internationally and having had over fifty solo exhibitions, Drysdale is revered as Australia’s most internationally successful ceramicist (McDonald, 2020). Despite her five-decade-long career, this is the artist’s first solo showing with Australian Galleries – and one that promises genuine delight.

Drysdale’s notoriety is formidable; perhaps even more so for an artist who is conscious of what she terms her “humble beginnings” as a herb grower. Based in Fremantle WA since 1983, where she still resides and has her studio, Drysdale is a well-known and active member of her community. Her international success has been underscored by strong support in her home state; her first retrospective was at John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University in 2007 (it included over 350 works); she was made a Living Treasure by the WA Government in 2015, and in 2020 was awarded her Honorary Doctorate in Arts from Curtin University. 

Drysdale’s engagement with landscape is complex – as Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding have suggested in An Idea Needing to be Made: Contemporary Ceramics, “Pippin Drysdale’s ensembles are quite literally a landscape in their aesthetic manifestation . . . the whole array of objects undulates into peaks and valleys over which the eyes can clamber” (2019). Her works interrogate landscape in different ways – Drysdale’s travels internationally and within Australia, our flora and fauna, particularly the Kimberley, have long been an inspiration to the artist. Well-known for her prolific output, vibrant, intense, intuitive use of colour and incised fine lines that meander, echo, and repeat, the Breakaway Series works, 2021-ongoing, sit comfortably within Drysdale’s oeuvre. They are perhaps best described as a magnification of her past works – what the artist terms a shift from capturing and being informed by “vastness of the ‘images’ to the smallness of ‘things.'” 

Perhaps it is this microscopic focus (and incidentally one that is shared by the gardener) – patience, sensitivity to detail, light, the minutiae of colour – that have imbued Drysdale’s latest series with their best qualities. 

Like flowers, these structures appear divinely perfect, boasting organic lines carefully made by a most knowing and perceptive hand. Like lollies or polished gems, they conjure a childlike desire to pick them up; their haptic brightness begs to be turned over and inspected. They sit grouped in parallel formations that seem intuitive, related but not replicated, informing each other but not imposing – entirely harmonious. Few artists can be described as “breathtaking,” but Drysdale is certainly one of them. 

A standout is the Muted Beauty series, 2021-22 – a grouping of oblong and circular closed forms, some with flatter sides. The colours are enchanting – pastel and buttery variations of pinks, corals, orange, lemon, ochre, blush – all pearlescent, with tiny hints of turquoise, lilac, lavender, and sea foam green that blush and blend pastel into each other. Like polished sea glass, the pieces appear perfect and smooth. Some of the larger vessels are carved and incised with series of repeated circular lines, reading like a thumbprint or a topographical map. They are not only ideas or engagements with the land; these works are the land – in their visual transformation it is easy to forget they are made from the earth, clay – these series are porcelain marble, which offers an inherent strength and translucency relative to other kinds of ceramics. 

Their perfection is the result of a most masterful creator and an entirely complex process that the artist has perfected. Without intending to dismiss ceramic art as decorous, Drysdale is described in the show’s media release as the vessels’ “decorator,” whilst their “thrower” is ceramic artist Warrick Palmateer. Drysdale shares a collaborative relationship with Palamateer and the pair have worked successfully together for over thirty years. Their collaboration is necessitated by the material conditions of clay – there is an intense physicality involved in preparing or “pugging” the clay for throwing, variously grinding and pushing, for which Drysdale relies on Palmateer. The process of creating form is complex – the thrown vessels are then refined, bisque fired, sanded, and finally glazed. The steps involve a lot of turning, rolling, compressing, and sponging, during which the vessels are fragile and can easily split. 

A damp sponge is then used to spray and pour coloured glaze on the inside, then outside of the form. During the colour application (involving still more sponging and spraying) hues bleed and fuse together in unpredictable ways. Drysdale explains that she has been seeking an increased sheen to the latest vessels and as such has been experimenting with lustre, a light diffusing material, to capture small detail – a dew drop or the refraction of light off an insect’s wing (Pippin Drysdale, 2022). With words like ‘iridescence’ and ‘fluttering’ and the vessel’s investigations into light and colour, its diffusal and haziness – all qualities that imply weightlessness – they are matched by surprisingly strong, heavy bases. 

This initial colouring is then followed by Drysdale incising, cutting, and brushing meandering lines in sections, changing direction, repeating this process, resting the vessel, filling the cut lines with a different colour, rubbing more glaze, sponging away residue. The artist ensures there is no burring or pilling, the vessels are entirely and completely smooth and polished (Bird, 2020). 

The result is stunning subtleties in tonality, each structure an almost playful semblance that illuminates another. The exhibition’s title, The Patterning of Light, suggests each grouping of vessels is almost a case study in its patterning in different landscapes – literal titles which hint at locations and imagery, and some aspect of the visual – Shady Canyons, 2002, Muted Beauty. 

Shady Canyons is literal – darker, with more intense reds greys and blacks, with a large white vessel appearing to cleave like a rock face, its lines colliding more forcefully than the echoing incisions on the other series. 

As well as sensitivity to place, there is an increasingly abstract lyricality and delicateness reflected in the more poetic titles Cadence, 2021-2022, and Diffraction, 2022. Cadence glows and blushes in shades of peach, clementine, blush, tangerine; hints of apricot, ginger, starfish, cerise, carnation. It is in these more tonal works that Drysdale displays an acute sensitivity to mood, a divine understanding of colour, and a true mastery of her craft. 

Works Cited
John McDonald, Pippin Drysdale Art, The Age, 8 August 2020
Joanna Bird, Landscapes in Porcelain, Ceramics Review, June 2020
Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding, An Idea Needing to be Made: Contemporary Ceramics, Heide Museum, 2019

EXHIBITION 
The Patterning of Light: Breakaway Series II-III
7 – 25 June 2022
Australian Galleries, Melbourne