![]() 'Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic’, 2016, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, installation view. When a visitor entered, hers was the first work they saw, offering its warm welcome. Another artist might have objected to such treatment, but to Woodman it felt just fine. When her sculptures were acquired by major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, they were often set out in the lobby with flowers in them. It postulates an untroubled, non-hierarchical situation for ceramics that had never previously existed, and mostly still doesn’t. Like other artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s (among them her friends Cynthia Carlson, Joyce Kozloff and Robert Kushner), her work is art/craft, domestic/public, serious/fun. Courtesy: Salon 94, New Yorkįor all the joy she threw our way, Woodman’s work also had an argument in it. She never abandoned studio pottery she took it along with her, as if guiding a well-loved friend by the hand.īetty Woodman, Allusion Pillow Pitcher, 2007, glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer and paint, 62 x 58 x 40 cm. This was typical of the way that Woodman re-imagined conventional techniques. Sometimes, you can still see the spiral motion of her throwing always, you can feel it. She would then cut up this stretched oblong and use the pieces to collage her forms. She might throw a large disk of clay, then elongate it by slapping it against a canvas-covered board. Through it all, Woodman used the wheel as a form generator. Her iconography expanded to include Japanese references, the graphic asymmetry of ukiyo-e prints and the glorious fabrics of kimonos. Noticing the importance of silhouette in these arrangements, she took a figural turn, bringing dance and fashion references into the work. She also made triptychs of pots with handle-like cutouts attached, another pairing of round and flat. In the 1980s Woodman made Janus-faced vases, dead flat on one side and volumetric on the other – vessels backing into their own representations. ![]() Pottery and painting, painting and pottery: for her, it was the great romance.īetty Woodman. They embodied her transition from functional to sculptural concerns: the upper extremity of a jug sprouting from a swelling cushion, whose broad surfaces act as a canvas. Woodman achieved exactly that in her celebrated ‘Pillow Pitchers’, a series she began around 1970. She wanted to bring to her recalcitrant medium a ‘kind of breath, or air’. ![]() Her aesthetic was that of a painter, even a watercolourist. She loved pots that were fresh and loose, glazes that ‘haven’t tightened in the kiln, that stay where they’re put’. She shared the central conviction of the craft movement: ‘If you have beautiful things to live with, it changes the kind of person you are.’ But she drew from an unusual palette of sources, the earthenware traditions of southerly climes: Italian majolica, Mexican redware, Tang dynasty figures, and Hispano-Moresque lusterwares. Most ceramists worked in the muted tones of high-fire stoneware. Woodman began her career as a functional potter in the 1950s, when American ceramics were basically brown. It is as if we had lost not just a great artist, but a whole bandwidth of the visible spectrum.īetty Woodman, Silk Pillow Pitcher, 1985, hand-thrown and assembled white earthenware with majolica glazes, 61 x 56 x 43 cm. Her hand was sure and quick, her every mark imbued with something difficult to name. Yet everything she touched was edged with delight. Woodman had remarkable drive for a female artist of her generation to succeed, that was an absolute requirement. They had colourful confetti frames, but were clear across the middle – so like her. I think of Betty Woodman, a few days after she died at the age of 87, and remember her eyeglasses.
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