Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

Ewen Henderson - 1999

Ewen Henderson’s current work is always likely to be so different from the last collection that one saw that it frequently comes as a shock. Since he began to use paper clay, first as a filler, and then as familiarity extended its possibilities, as part of the fabric of his pieces, they have become even more contorted: skeletal and geomorphic, things of rock and mineral subject to erosion, or once living things petrified rather than made and fired. Clay and paper together; flattened, folded and twisted; screwed up, balled, torn, and shredded and stuck back together by vitrification. Surfaces which a few years ago were always entirely and reveallingly ceramic; scorched, blistered and burnt with colour and texture as patchwork, lamination and stratification, clay and glaze in melted rivulets and pools, are now things stained, impregnated with colour transferred to the surface, or rising to it from the paper used as sheets; high fired monoprints.

If the most of us wonder what it is he is doing and what his relationship is to contemporary ceramics, or any other area of modern art, we would only be asking the same questions that he constantly poses himself. He did start out as a practising potter. Lucie Rie remembered him from his Camberwell days as the most talented student she ever taught, and when he left college he was content, for a while, to make domestic, functional everyday pots. Now, some thirty years later when his work is as far from domestic ceramics as anything else taking place on the edge of fine art, and yet because of the medium he works in, ignored by the fine art world, he follows his own solitary path as isolated as all the genuine innovators of our time. His stance with regard to craft and art he stated some time ago for the benefit of the curious and critical. He called it a Credo:

"No fine tuning what once appeared to be an idea, or joining the ranks of the quasi-religious...