3. Juni 2012 - New Ceramics

opposite page stacked cups
right tea set
recognition in the public eye and among the initiated.
As early as 1968, Helena Brennan had begun to throw
pots in porcelain, and in the same year she exhibited them in
Osaka, Japan, at the World Exhibition. After her husband's
death seventeen years ago, whose teaching at the NCAD she
partly took over along side running the pottery, a number
of solo exhibitions followed. The file with the records of her
work in the 1990s is particularly full!
From 2000 until 2004, she was mainly occupied with a
commission for the Stations of the Cross in the Church of
Mary Immaculate in Dublin. She executed the individual
The special look and feel of Helena Brennan's
porcelain pots comes from the interplay of a
lightness of colour in which it is the delicate
shades of copper that dominate.
stations in the form of porcelain reliefs, which she prepared
with careful drawing. Immediately afterwards, one of her
brothers discovered the house where she now lives in Avoca,
which she has converted to suit her own requirements.
The independence that she has earned herself, as well as
the time and peace she has in this location, have given her
the liberty and perhaps the freedom from care that she seems
to throw into her porcelain pots. She has remained faithful
to functional vessels, mainly using porcelain and glazes for
this, firing them in reduction in a gas kiln to 1270°C, lending
each piece a sense of uniqueness. The special look and feel of
Helena Brennan's porcelain pots comes from the interplay of a
lightness of colour in which it is mainly the delicate shades of
copper that dominate.
She creates forms that have been thrown but which follow
the idea of lightness, transparency and openness, often
breaking out of the rigid perfection of axial symmetry. Only
when feeling relaxed herself does she enter her studio. She
is conscious that you can only make good work when all the
conditions are right.
Her own understanding of the working process is beginning
to change: she would increasingly like to withdraw from the
creative process. She sees herself in the role of a choreographer
of plastic clay, attentively accompanying the creative
process in dialogue with the raw materials, the fire and the
weather conditions, guiding it intuitively rather than controlling
it. In future, she would like to use materials found on her
land in her work and the wood from the trees that grow here
for the firings. To throw the pots so thinly, or even too thinly,
so that after they have softened in the heat of the glaze firing,
thay adopt their own relaxed form when cooling is a further
idea.
What was occupying her most during my visit was what
she calls “Life Forms". These are pots that have no identifiable
function.
Sybille Ritter is a ceramist with her own studio in Inneringen.
www.keramik.sybille-ritter.de
HeLena BRennan
Helena Brennan was born in Dublin in 1942. She attended the national
College of arts, trained in 1963-4 under David Leach and in 1966
opened her own pottery in Dun Laoghaire together with her husband.
She trained many emerging potters there. In 1968, she and her husband
represented Ireland at the World Crafts Council in Peru, in 1982
she ran a seminar for the european World Crafts Council on Bornholm,
Denmark, and in July 1996, she gave seminars at the International Ceramic
Workshop in Tokoname, Japan. In 1998, she exhibited in Cape
Town, South africa, where she also taught a master class for ceramics
students. In 2011, year of Craft in Ireland, she exhibited in Dublin.
HELENA BRENNAN
Tel. +353 (0) 402 35225
studio@helenabrennan.com
www.helenabrennan.com
May / June 2012 NEW CERAMICS 33
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