The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 52 No 3 November 2013

Tribute: Gwyn Hanssen Pigott
Gwyn Hanssen (Pigott), stoneware punch set
London, circa 1962: photo credit: Pottery Quarterly
Vol 7 No 28; edited Murray Fieldhouse
For Ivan McMeekin, who spent time in
China before studying in England with Leach
and Michael Cardew, the 'Sung standard' was
accepted without question. When MCMeekin
returned to Australia from England to set up
the ceramics workshop at Sturt, he sought
to reproduce as closely as possible the classic
wares of China, despite being separated from
that originating culture by vast stretches of time
and distance, and perhaps even of need. But
McMeekin was tenacious and utterly convinced
of his path and where he single-mindedly led, his
young student followed. She took pressure off
McMeekin by assuming responsibility for some of
the teaching at Sturt, helpfully translating from
the French the letters of the seventeenth-century
Jesuit missionary Pere D'Entrocolles concerning Chinese porcelain manufacture, while digging for clay
amongst the gum trees of the Southern Highlands in New South Wales.
When, with McMeekin's blessing, she went to England in the late 1950s, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott set
about furthering her education in ceramics at a time when Bernard Leach was the dominant figure and
when his early apprentices were now leaders in their own right. Despite her commitment to this rather
conservative approach to studio pottery, she also brushed up against a gentle version of modernism in
London, where potters like Lucie Rie and Hans Coper had brought a 'Continental' sensibility to the field.
Gwyn Hanssen, as she was then, began to make a name for herself in London. Contemporary
commentators remarked on her work as being" ... completely acceptable .. a potter's potter .. ." 4
whose work" ... more or less summarises the Leach-Cardew-Davis-Finch field .. akin to the work of
the Mackenzie's in the USA and McMeekin in Australia" S Pottery that belonged to the tradition of
"Workshop potters versus art school potters. Useful-ware potters versus sculptor-painter-potters"6, this
last observation having particular resonance when viewed in the light of her later work.
A typical example of her output at the time, from a 1962 exhibition at Primavera gallery in London,
was almost a craft cliche: a 'punch set' consisting of cups with handles, a large, footed bowl and a
ceramic ladle, all in muted, ash-glazed stoneware. And although Alison Britten, writing of this period
in her essay 'Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: a view from her second home", recalls that she represented a " ..
benchmark of sound and sensitive practice .."8, other commentators had a different view, with Robert
Melville, writing a few years earlier in Architectural Review, remarking that much of the ceramics
coming out of the crafts movement seemed to belong to a " ... village and market town community of
highly aesthetic peasants .. ."9
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott would soon reinforce this commitment to tradition (and here the word
'tradition' needs to be understood as being as much notional as factual) and by the mid-sixties, inspired
by the simple beauty of French domestic pottery, she had settled in the district of Haut-Berry a few
hours south of Paris . She built a large woodfired kiln and used local materials in a direct extension of
McMeekin's purist methodologies, which he in turn had inherited from Leach. (In truth, Leach was
quite willing to modify his purist approach for the sake of expediency - it was more the early students
like Michael Cardew and Harry Davis who took some of his ph ilosophical urgings to what can only be
described as fanatical extremes.)
6 THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS NOVEMBER 2013