Ewen Henderson - His Inside / Outside Complex Series

Lucie Rie considered Ewen Henderson to be one of her most important pupils; she had taught him at Camberwell College of Arts in the mid 1960s. But no British artist has been quite so radical in moving away from the essential symmetry of the wheel to a constructed sculpture of both great power and delicacy. Henderson initially studied as a painter and brought its sensibilities to clay, able from the outset to see ceramics as an ideal medium in which he could express two and three-dimensional ideas, using ‘fluxed earth’ (as he called it) to push boundaries, to create completely new forms and surfaces. He knew he was re-writing the rules many times over. This outstanding piece from his 'Complex Series' of 1988 is a summation of a path he had been following for some years, concerned as much with the interiors as the exteriors of his pots, but now breaking with the vessel form altogether as he moved from big jars, bowl and dish shapes to very complex open pieces, adopting the vocabulary of pure sculpture. As he wrote at the time:

My present work is obsessed with edges, points of change, endings. It explores the significance of what is broken, torn or cut, the ability of single or multiple forms to speak of either compression or expansion, flatness or fullness. It is a kind of drawing in three dimensions. I start with fragments - familiar, found, improvised - and then build up to complex structures that invite the observer to consider such matters as memory, invention and metaphor.

It was as if, like a Cubist painter, he was taking an object and opening it out into a multiplicity of planes and contours. In doing so pieces like this example strongly evoke forms in the landscape; aspects of its intricate geology, animal sculls, the sentinel standing stones that punctuate our moorlands, all themes that preoccupied Henderson through this period. His use of clay laminates with stains and oxides resulted in richly textured surfaces and subtle colouration, 'introducing a palette' as he once put it. Expansion and contraction during the firing further contorted, split and blistered the surfaces, creating deep patinas that resembled the natural actions of weather and time. His methods of building gave him the necessary freedom to add and subtract, to rethink and change a piece as it was being made.

This piece was first exhibited at Galerie Besson in London, the principal London gallery for both Henderson’s and Rie’s work from the late 1980s and through the following decade. Its enterprising and visionary owner Anita Besson (1933-2015) had first exhibited both potters, alongside Hans Coper, at Fischer Fine Arts in St James’s, where she had been a director. This piece shows Henderson at his most ambitious, a technical and imaginative high wire act, a structural tour-de-force which shows the artist at his most playful too, teasing the clay into structures never before seen in ceramics.

-David Whiting