Pippin Drysdale: Breakaway is now on view at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney

Pippin Drysdale: Breakaway is now on view at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney

July 25 – August 22, 2020

An acclaimed international artist, Living Treasure Award 2015 recipient, Honorary Doctor for the Arts, Curtin University 2020 and Master of Australian Craft, Pippin Drysdale’s career as a ceramic artist spans forty five years. Her passion for the craft merges with a love of the landscape, which has travelled across continents and in most recent years has focussed on the vivid desert landscapes of Australia. Her works evoke a timeless and breathtaking sense of space and place within finely crafted porcelain vessels, narrating the mesmorising vastness of colour experienced in the unique Australian landscape.

Pippin’s international profile has seen her artworks included in the foremost exhibitions of contemporary ceramics, and represented in some of the finest galleries. The brilliance of her works has resulted in their inclusion in hundreds of museums, galleries and private collections worldwide.

In over 40 years as a full time practising ceramic artist, the Australian landscape has never ceased to inspire and fascinate Pippin Drysdale. For the ‘Breakaway’ exhibition, she wanted to create a visual response to the topography of chasms, gorges, gaps and cavities created over millions of years. This collection represents the spine of our landscape, the cliffs, caves and ecosystems that play a unique role within nature’s maps; succour offering shelter, water and food; and points of surveillance and safety.

Inspired initially by the compelling formations in the Karlu Karlu Conservation Reserve near Katherine in the Northern Territory, and walking and camping around the Bungle Bungles in the Kimberley, the works resonate with both a deep respect for the profound physical beauty of the landscape and the sacred connection to country, stories and cultural life of Australia’s First Nations People.

Pippin saw in the natural process of the weathering and erosion that shapes, scars, and colours those spectacular natural wonders create, with the challenge to create drawings of layered colours around ceramic forms. She has long understood that landscape is not just about the physical form, and over time has tried, using colour and pattern, to describe the effect of light changing hues over the passing of time from sunrise to sunset, and season to season.

In ‘Breakaway’, Pippin has sought to capture the vastness of the Australian sky and the effects of differing weather patterns. The sky is where the earth and the universe meet and whether it is a cloudless cerulean blue or dark or the grey and purple of a looming storm, its luminous, lustrous magnificence is all-encompassing.

Maggie Baxter is an artist, curator, and writer who lives and works in Western Australia

All photos by Rob Frith, Acorn Photos.

Contact
+61 2 9361 6448
gallery@sabbiagallery.com

Sabbia Gallery
609 Elizabeth Street
Redfern Sydney
NSW 2016 Australia