Home

.

  Main
  Gallery
  Callas
  Okazaki
  Voulkos
  Soldner
  Henderson
  Champy
  Reitz
  Hirsch
  Meyers
  Fouilhoux
  Gregory

  Annex
  Budge
  Copensky
  Lindsey
  
       NEW  
    SLIDE SHOW
   
     click   image

     SUBMIT
       YOUR
    CERAMIC
         ART
       We will
       build a
       gallery
       for you



       BROWSE
       SEARCH
          SHOP
  
     MERCHANT
     SPONSORS
     Use our sponsor
     links and help
     support student
     artists

 

 
 
.
   
 



   
   

 

.

        Ewen Henderson's work is of a piece with his personality. Only someone
   impulsive, and perhaps a trifle cussed, someone who loves life and believes
   profoundly in risk taking, could produce so wide a range of objects so
   strikingly combining strength, power and delicacy. A comparable intensity
   comes across in his drawings and watercolours, some of which are included
   in the Print Gallery.
        Such strength is not lightly acquired, and the 60 years that have shaped
   these works have been far from easy. Henderson was brought up in a county
   associated with a very different form of ceramic ware, Staffordshire. Both
   his parents came from Scottish medical families, and his father worked for
   many years as the resident GP at a large red-brick lunatic asylum, as
   psychiatric hospitals were then called, at Cheddleton, near Leek: 'a
   frightening place designed to keep people mad', as Ewen recalls it. The
   Hendersons lived in a handsome staff house, with inmates acting as their
   'servants'. It was a strange and not very happy childhood: Dr.Henderson had
   been wounded in the First World War and had never really recovered.
        Ewen - and his older brother, who now lives in Spain - were sent off to
   board at a sound if uninspiring grammar school in Shropshire. After failing
   to secure a short-service commission in the RAF, he completed his National
   Service in the RAF Regiment in northern Germany. Being, as he recalls,
   'rebellious and stupid', he gave no thought on demob to further education,
   but took up an apprenticeship in a chemical company based in Castleford,
   near Leeds. He soon found himself manager of a branch in Cardiff
   responsible for impregnating timber. 'I was guilty of making timber
   unrottable in a series of revolting houses in Newport which should have been
   allowed to rot very quickly'.
        At last, however, his intellect and senses were beginning to stir from their
   deep sleep. An interest in classical music had been sparked while in Germany
   by hearing Furtwangler conduct the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra in Kiel,
   an experience that affected him as strongly as any in his life. Music was to
   become one of the great passions of his life; his enthusiasms range from
   pre-Baroque to contemporary composers - Tallis to Tippet - and right through
   the great Germans and Russians: he particularly admires Russian culture
   from Gogal through to Shostakovich and such performers as the pianist
   Sviatoslav Richter. Many artists love music. Few know as much about it as
   Henderson.
        In Wales he began to read, to visit Cardiff's museums, and attend evening
   classes at its art school. Then crucially, he enrolled at the Barry Summer
   School in a small town west of Cardiff. There he encountered not just Terry
   Frost and Kenneth Martin but a great teacher and underrated artist, Harry
   Thubron. The course was called Colour, Form, Space, and it was a real eye
   and door opener. After six or seven years with the chemical firm he handed
   in his notice and signed up for a pre-diploma course at Goldsmiths College
   in London. He was 29: not many artistic high achievers can have become
   aware so late of where their true talent lies.
       It was while doing the foundation course at Goldsmiths that he was first
   seduced by clay: students could go off to the schools pottery and try their
   hand. 'I fell in love with both the material and the vessel as a magical form;
   but it was a long time before I realized how I wanted to use it. From the first
   I was seduced by the alchemy of change whereby you take a material and do
   things to it and it is transmogrified into something else'. So after a year he
   proceeded to Camberwell to study ceramics under, among others, Hans
   Coper and Lucie Rie, while continuing to draw and paint.
       Although he respected Coper's intellect, he rebelled against both teachers
   and started, against considerable opposition, to build vessels freely rather
   than on the wheel, then still an heretical act in Britain. Symmetrically forms
   seemed too static. In asymmetry, he felt, lay a much greater dynamic
   potential. His subsequent career has, apart from a few days teaching per
   week, been devoted to that search for greater expressiveness.
       Inevitably this has involved movement towards the field of sculpture,
   raising the age old question: what, if any, is the difference between art and     
   craft? Why should an object be rated as sculpture if it is in wood, bronze or
   steel, yet a craft product made of clay? As Henderson points out, no such
   distinction exists in China or Japan, and much Pre-Columbian and early
   European sculpture was in clay. As for tribal artifacts, of which Henderson
   is a great admirer, their material was as irrelevant as it was multifarious.
   In their original context they were simply not seen fron an aesthetic view-
   point, being produced for specific uses, often connected with religion or death.
   He blames classical Greece for opening up the art/craft gap - those who          
   painted vases and plates in that seminal era were not those who made them
   - and the artists of the Renaissance for perpetuating it.
   Henderson has not been alone, even in dear insular Britain, in pushing
   ceramic art in the direction of sculpture. But he has pushed harder and
   longer than most. 'My present work is obsessed with edges, points of change,
   endings,' he said. '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 complete the circuit, so to
   speak, by considering such matters as memory, invention and metaphor.'
       The medium in which he nowadays works is a composite of clays and
   paper pulp. It is tricky to handle, but the results convey a sense of the age-
   old conflict between the material and the artist's will. The expressive poss-
   ibilities of this paper clay include the creation of forms that combine delicacy
   with strength. Henderson feels that what emerges from his Camden Town
   studio has vastly more in common with the work of, of say, the sculptor
   Julio Gonzalez than that of Lucie Rie. One day, surely, the art world will
   wake up to this fact.
       In his drawing, Henderson has latterly achieved something of a break-
   through, though one involving inner vision rather than materials. Drawing
   is; he believes, an essential discipline. 'It's not so much that you get ideas
   from drawings, it's that the action of drawing makes you look intensely: you
   struggle with understanding form and how to represent it in terms of marks
   on paper. It makes you contemplate what is underneath the surface.' His
   drawing  excursions have for the past five years been directed by a
   new passion - for megalithic circles and their mysterious harmonies. His
   favourite is the one known as Long Meg and her Daughters in the Eden
   Valley in Cumbria, though he has visited others as far afield as Orkey (there
   are, he believes, some 500 in the British Isles).
       Megaliths have given his drawing a new focus and, he believes, a new   
   intensity. In some mysterious way they have also enabled him to work for
   the first time from memory and imagination. 'I can think about that
   experience in Orkey, go out to the studio, take some paper and do a series
   of images which are an equivalence of that experience - which is not like
   sitting in front of them and drawing them, though I still think it's important to
   do that too.'
       If what might loosely be called the art world has difficulty accepting the
   sculptural nature of Henderson's ceramics, what chance is there of it
   acknowledging that an artist pigeonholed as a potter can also be a water-
   colourist of real quality? For all such doubts and difficulties, Henderson
   remains both an enthusiast and an optimist. The tide is shifting in his favor,
   he believes, especially among the young. They like his risk-taking and they
   see no need to categorize his work.
       His exhibition curated by the Midlands Arts Centre, together with the
   exhibition he presented at The Crafts Council in 1995, suggest that this
   cussed tightrope-walker may indeed be winning through.

                                                                                         Roger Bertroud
                                                                                                    July 1995


        
         by Roger Berthoud
         1995   hardcover