Pippin Drysdale's Tanami (desert) Traces.

You can’t get away from those very strong fundamentals of process, because if you try and cheat the system it never works.  You can’t get away with not doing the work, not following the process.  You’ve got to eat and sleep it.  That’s how I work, totally involved in creating, this Tanami Series I will have taken me more than a year to develop as a major body of work.  Its been fraught with a lot of technical difficulties even last week I discovered that you can’t re-fire the pot it will crack

 Pippin Drysdale,on the Tanami (desert) Traces Series I August 2002

For Pippin Drysdale technique always concerns continuous invention and experiment; it is never about reliable elegance or repeatability.  The knife-edge presence of her painted forms emerges from an extended process of experiment and improvising towards a particular remembered sensation, a precise 'expression of an experience' as she puts it.  In this case the experience was a plane trip across central Australia in and around the Tanami Desert region taken as part of a recent fellowship from Arts WA

Australian artists have often used aeroplane view as a painterly convention, a means to compose their gesture landscapes in a flat plane. Perhaps because Drysdale is a potter she saw the land differently, as a challenge to make elegant subtly shifting irregular patterns, graft across the curved ceramic surface. She was fascinated by the subtle traces of the land its forms and shadows as they slid down slowly from the horizon, pink at sunset, deepest blue green at dawn.

It demanded major changes in her working method to evoke this in a ceramic form with an independent presence, an autonomous beauty. It took seven months of experiment with her assistant Warrick Palmateer, who throws her pots to develop an appropriate shape from hundreds of small maquettes, each a slightly different in shape. Her previous series had used wide bowl shapes or occasionally a tight cylindrical profile both of which were suitable for a radically expressive, painterly approach to colours and glazes. Now she had to abandon the immediate spontaneity of earlier work. In this case the curvature required a greater subtly, the lip of the vessels are more precise relation to the volume and the cross section so that the space implied by its outer surface would unfold slowly to the inner eye.

The vessels must also be able to hold a tightly disciplined system of highly crafted lines and stains, unlike the nebulous forms in her recent work which were achieved almost entirely buy a mixture of wax or latex resists and glazes calculated to achieve a semi predictable drift across the surface, a specific density or translucency on firing. The creation of the new form went hand in hand with the development of a new type of crumbling, linear decoration that wrapped round the vessel like rough woven raw silk. Over time form and decoration slowly fused into one, a single inevitable presence arose, from hundreds of possibilities judged inadequate to the intensity of the original experience. Drysdale kept detailed, but informal, notes during this long process.. . mainly in the form of ‘notes to myself as to what to do next-

When I started this body, I found it very hard to visualize what I wanted. I find mostly the way I work is with a physical form. I have to make it see it and have a process of elimination. This doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, and then yes this one’s got something, lets work with this and move on to next problem. The form evolves over seven or eight months. I learned to keep the base physicaly heavy and use a sense of gravity. I wanted the form to be quite beautiful in itself to float and have tension.

The form of the vessels finally chosen with their slightly constricted lip an upper quarter was perfect for the sensation of a rolling horizon but tended to limit the size to 40-50 centimetres high, the maximum that could be thrown and turned to shape in one piece.Experiments with large sizes, made by inverting one wet pot over another and fusing the join with a blowtorch were only partially successful. Larger sizes tended to crack and distort in the firing.

Drysdale uses Southern Ice Porcelain, white fine, plastic clay, which is good for throwing but has a high shrinkage rate and must be left, to dry   slowly over long time to avoid cracking and distorting. She is not interested in the traditional lumincescesnc of porcelain but in its remarkable qualities as a subtle support of ambitious intensely bright, high Barium glazes, which produce rich colours and a sensationally resonant, satin  surface, subtle to both eye and hand, with no trace of conventional brittleness or fragility.

Her expressive experimental relationship to technique is maintained in every detail of the process.  Like every other aspect of her technique the process is always aimed towards an intuitively felt but absolutely clear aesthetic outcome. The basic glaze recipe is mixed in the studio, 30 litres at a time then clearly prepared by sieving through 120, 150 then 200 mesh sieve over many hours to mix the particles, to eliminate everything that might disrupt the ultimate silken surface, anything that could cause unevenness or pin holing.

The very expensive colours, stains and oxides are all added to the prepared base glaze and then treated similarly.  Everything is prepared in the studio, on the work floor, as part of the act of creation.  Drysdale has nothing but contempt for shop bought glazes and colours – which, she says, are useful only for the most vulgar kitsch.

Her base glaze Recipe is

Barium Glaze  (Orton cone 6)

Potash Feldspar           60%

Whiting                       10%

Magnesite (heavy)       10%

Bentonite (USA)         4%

Ferro Frit 4113            25%

The 20% Barium content, induces fabulous colours when blending stains and oxides.  According to the percentage of frit (20-30%) used this enables you to fire from Orton Cone 5 to 7. 20%-30% of stain (per 100 gms of dry weight) and in some cases a small percentage of oxides can be added to the base which will create very rich colour results.  Line blends can also be used to establish the melting point and colour saturation desired. Bentonite (USA) 4% is a must, this prevents the glaze settling out. All works are fired in oxidation in Skutt kiln top loading.  Because of the painting medium applied all over there is a great deal of vapour due to the burning of liquidtex, keep lid up a few cms, and top bung out up to 600 degrees, then shut lid, place bung in, and put on high, the firing time is 7-9 hours. Fired to cone 6. (no soaking)

The development of this Barium Glaze was greatly assisted by Ceramic Chemist Mike Kusnik who has played an important role throughout  Drysdale’s career.

Her main concern is colour……..

I LOVE colour, I•m passionate about it, I spend a great deal of time testing and developing many monochromatic variations and depth of colour through the use of stains and oxides. There is no end to the constant discovery of magnificent rich and subtle colours. There•s also the added surprise and joy of the fusion due to the application of the layers of colours. This creates interesting •one off• gems. So often, colours come and go • never to be seen again•..but if you don•t take risks and let yourself go, these types of results can•t be achieved. Commitment • that•s all I have to say

In the Tanami series colours and surfaces are produced in a complex, highly crafted process. First three or four layers of coloured glazes and stains are sprayed on the outside surface of the vessel. These have been prepared with certain levels of density, transparency and gravity induced running in mind though the final outcome is always impossible to predict. The inside of the vessel is coloured by half filling it with coloured glaze and swirling it round until a perfectly graduated colouring is produced. An evenly coloured inner void in which form becomes a function of light is essential to the overall presence of the work but this sublimely sensitive density cannot be achieved with spraying alone, which leaves a dry powdery effect.

The groups of clusters of lines in crystalline vitrified glazes moving roughly horizontally round each vessel are made by applying colour into incised lines after the initial spraying of glazes.  Using liquitex painting medium as a resist does this very accurately.  It is much more precise than wax or latex and burns away without creating a vile odour or any other environmental problems.

It has the disadvantage, however, that it dries and spoils rather quickly.  The blades used for this work also wear out after a few minutes work.  Only a small patch of surface can be worked on at a time, which can limit the form of the design.  Once the surface is incised, special dry brushes are used to brush out the groves and to clean up the edges of the liquitex resist so that no ragged fragments or particles affect the glaze.  Then thick coloured glazes, almost a paste are rubbed into them.  A single pot can take several days to prepare and ‘ paint’ in this way.  Sometimes a further transparent glaze is rubbed over the surface.  However, only one firing is possible without risk. 

A successfully fired pot is so vitreous it rings like a bell.

When Drysdale developed this technique she worked for several weeks on shards doing all kinds of drawings but it eventually became clear that different forms of ‘traces’ lines that resonate with the form of the vessel made more sense.

Initially when I started to play with that technique I created drawings that looked like cave frescos.  From that I suddenly though this would give me the ability to create some lovely traces. The very title Tanami Traces came just from my heart.

You’ve got to remember that I’ve never been able to draw. I can’t draw – I’ve never been able to draw bodies. I can’t foreshorten anything. I ve got no sense of perspective. All that has affected the way I see things. I see in a very abstract way. I can’t really draw the landscape, I draw emotion and feeling from the landscape; I think I always have.

The most realistic aspect of the landscape I have done in the past is the use of the horizon line. To actually make the commitment of a minute almost microscopic sensation of the land as if one were looking through a microscope picking up the little fragments or secrets and then representing that feeling in this work is very satisfying.

In firing the lines feather out or bleed slightly into the glazes which themselves blossom and weep into the surrounding surface.

I long to get that feathering or bleeding or that fusion in all the works buts its very difficult, what happens is that all the stains and colours produced have different degrees of melting in the firing, some fuse, bleed more than others. When you are working with so many colours you have to have cut pint for the flux that controls the running temperatures – you can’t have one running and one standing stiff. It would be terrible mess.

With the incised lines its nice to have strong lines and variations of line to express different emotional responses in relation to line fusing outwards, almost disappearing or coming in strong but you cant control that

Even so Drysdale achieves a remarkable relation between the technical possibilities of her art and landscape. Consider the way the glazes thin out at the lip of each vessel during firing just like the sky and land a the horizon one ‘process’ parallels another in this way through out her new work. Technique and creative intuition could not be more intimately balanced.