Ruth Duckworth: potter and sculptor
(Ceramic Review)
Duckworth: she drew inspiration from nature and explored the inner space rather than the surface in her work
Ruth Duckworth was one of the most innovative and influential postwar potters in Britain, before transforming herself in America from a ground-breaking studio potter to an important sculptor in clay.
She was born Ruth Windmuller in 1919 in Hamburg, the youngest of five children in a prosperous Jewish family with nannies and servants. Her father was a lawyer, born in Manchester, where his family owned cotton mills. Life in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was far from easy and, while the Windmuller family was comparatively fortunate, there were many hardships and restrictions. She wished to study art, but art school was forbidden (to prevent the “pollution” of Aryan culture) and so she came to England in 1936 to live with her sister, who had married a sea captain and was residing in Liverpool.
Duckworth enrolled at the Liverpool School of Art, where she studied, somewhat unsuccessfully, painting, drawing and, particularly, sculpture. During the war she was employed by a travelling puppet theatre and worked in a munitions factory. After the war she studied stone carving at the Kennington School of Art and spent nearly three years carving tombstones three days a week. Her sculptural work culminated in a large commission, Stations of the Cross in St. Joseph’s, New Malden, Surrey, which was executed with her husband, Aidron Duckworth.
Duckworth had begun working in clay and approached the famous potter, Lucie Rie, for some glaze recipes. Rie suggested that she would need some training and Duckworth enrolled at the Hammersmith School, but only stayed a year. She found “the teaching was too doctrinaire. A pot must have a foot, a middle, and a lip”. She spent a further two years studying at the Central School.
About 1959 Duckworth started seriously concentrating on clay in her studio near Kew Gardens — her first kiln was paid for by suing the German Government for “loss of education”. She began by producing fine tableware in stoneware and porcelain. Most were light, thrown shapes, but she also made cast pieces. She was especially known for producing beautiful coffee sets. The work was modern and radically different from other functional studio pottery being made at that time
Duckworth had become inspired by seeing the ancient Mexican pots in the British Museum and decided that she wanted to handbuild. About 1960 she began making large, coiled stoneware pots. These were unlike anything seen before in British studio ceramics. Her heavy asymmetrical cylinders, or ovoids, had rough, dry surfaces and defied conventional notions of beauty. Massive forms were built on very small bases giving a false impression of instability. These pots usually were partly covered with poured ash glazes, which she handled very differently from the Leach-inspired potters. This work put her at the forefront of a group of potters, including Gordon Baldwin, Ian Auld and Bernard Rooke, who were exploring the possibilities of handbuilding in the early 1960s.
Duckworth’s tiny, delicate and white porcelain pots were in stark contrast to her rough, heavy stoneware. Most of these little porcelain pieces were pinched, though Duckworth occasionally slabbed or even threw. It is difficult to imagine today how radical these pots must have looked in the early 1960s to people accustomed to seeing the porcelain of Lucie Rie or Bernard Leach.
The most striking thing of all about Duckworth’s pots, both stoneware and porcelain, is how organic they are. Many of her stoneware pots were inspired by the cross-sections of fruit or vegetables. Others have been compared to breasts or to moss-covered stones. “Pebble pots” became the term for the countless stone-like pots that many potters, imitating Duckworth, made in the 1960s. Partly this organic look comes from the handbuilding process itself. The asymmetry produced by handbuilding is subtly different from the asymmetry of squashing a thrown round form into an oval.
Her porcelain was even more obviously derived from nature than the stoneware. Many of her pots are reminiscent of seed-pods, fungus, branches or shells. Some of the best porcelain makers of the 1970s were influenced by Duckworth’s work.
In 1964 she was offered a teaching post at the University of Chicago. She intended to stay for only a year, but she ended up settling there. One of the reasons that Britain lost such an important potter was Duckworth’s unwillingness to put her dogs in six-month quarantine if she returned. Her husband came to the United States in 1965 but they lived apart and divorced a year later.
In America she soon transformed herself from a ground-breaking studio potter to an important sculptor in clay. The principal artistic reason she remained in the United States was to work on a bigger scale. In Britain she had struggled to sell the larger pots — now she could work on a massive scale. The mural Clouds Over Lake Michigan (1976), which Duckworth executed for the Dresdner Bank in Chicago, measures 240 sq ft, and another, Earth, Water and Sky (1968), for the University of Chicago (where she taught until 1977) is 400 sq ft. Duckworth wanted to work large and it was unlikely that many such commissions would be available in England.
From her Chicago studio in a converted pickle factory she poured out an ever-evolving array of fine sculptures and murals. In the 1990s she also began producing large bronzes. There were no more small stoneware pots and functional wares, but she continued to make the small porcelain pieces.
While the nature of her work changed considerably, the toughness, the awkward asymmetry, the ability to raise questions rather than provide resolutions remained strong elements. Duckworth was an adventurous and restless creator who once said: “I would like to learn to scuba dive . . . to go down into that dark depth.” It is this exploration of the inner space rather than the surface that kept her work so interesting. One recurring aspect of this was her constant dividing of the interior volume — in both her small porcelain and large stoneware sculptural vessels — often called the “Mama” pots.
Duckworth’s considerable success was confirmed by many public commissions, representation in more than 50 museums around the world, an honorary doctorate in 1982 from DePaul University, and dozens of solo exhibitions. A big exhibition in 1976 at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg was a particularly emotional one for her. Despite all this, there is little doubt that had Ruth Duckworth worked primarily in some other medium than clay her public recognition would have been much greater.
Duckworth is survived by her nephew, whom she and Aidron adopted as their son after the death of his mother, one of Duckworth’s sisters.
Ruth Duckworth, potter and sculptor, was born on April 10, 1919. She died on October 18, 2009, aged 90
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