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      Artist in Fluxed Earth

   A Number of people have claimed, including myself on many occasions,
   that Ewen Henderson is one of Britain's most important artists and one
   of the greatest artists working in ceramic today anywhere in the world.
   Such claims ultimately need rationalizing, or at least qualifying if they are
   not to be lost amongst all the clamouring gibberish and sale-speak
   promotion of our age, and if they are to draw an attentive response from
   the wider public to the artist and his work.

   Clay and the processes that transform into ceramic have provided some of
   the most exciting advances and manifestations of art in our time, as
   generations of people trained in art schools, and exposed to all aspects
   of creative activity have pursued their own personal directions in it.
   What began just after the war as a craft movement seeking oriental aims
   and philosophies soon found its own feet and sought directions more in
   keeping with its own time and cultural milieu. The advances have not been
   easy. Ceramic is not something you can just squeeze from a tube, apply
   to a surface and leave to dry. The building and making processes through
   which one's intellectual notions meet and receive physical presence are
   only part of it, the firing, sometimes a multiple event, is where the thing
   achieves its true character. The easy way out is to find a firing that
   simply fixes what has been made, like a high temperature hair spray.
   However, a 'real' firing is the most significant contribution to the act of
   making the thing, transforming one's ideas and opening all sorts of
   possibilities. In fact a new art language.

   Most of the activity in studio ceramics has been in those areas familiar
   to western traditions; the domestic and the ornamental, and individuals
   responsible for all stages of designing, making and decorating have
   brought fresh life to the decorative arts through their personal
   involvement, creating a plethora of new styles and an immense variety
   of approaches to the processes and problems of working with clay.
   The major developments, however, are not merely changes in style and
   approach to those already existing, but fundamentally different usage's
   of ceramic. They have taken place in that area that we still refer to as
   high or fine art; the use of ceramic by artists making statements about
   issues previously outside the ceramic world. Sometimes they bridge the
   gap by giving the conventional a presence it never had before, producing
   vessels that definitely have a sculptural presence as great as anything
   made by figurative or abstractionist sculptors. Or as sculptors, who
   pursue their own direction using ceramic as the medium, pushing it into
   exploring entirely new ground.

   Such artists are rare even in a world sense, and frequently work in
   isolation. Ewen Henderson fits into this category. He wanted to be a
   painter but was attracted to clay because all of the exciting possibilities
   it offered, even in conventional usage. His early vessels were not so
   much pots as explorations of clay and fire using the pot as the starting
   point for his own very personal journeys. His way of working and abuse,
   (as it was seen by many potters and critics) of clay and kiln developed
   into a language, a voice, and the statement that they articulated. Ignoring
   the developments in international mainstream sculpture as much as in
   studio pottery; fine art as much as decorative art; and going for bust all
   the time, he is one of the few genuine originals in art today. His medium
   is itself the inspiration to a large extent of his work, a subjectivity on
   which frightening demands are made and in which at times he so totally
   immerses himself that the danger of complete dissipation seems
   unavoidable. Yet, regardless of other fears and the risk of loss, failure
   and destruction, he always emerges with something new: some refinement
   of existing skill and control; some discovery of new direction and
   possibilities; some clarification of that aim that is as spiritual as it is
   intellectual and physical.

   In Britain recently we have see a number of artists turning to the use of
   clay as they have to an immense variety of other materials, sometimes
   combining it in mixed media works sometimes working in clay alone.
   However, clay is not wood or metal, it requires conversion by the
   immensely variable process of firing to achieve its true potential and
   unfortunately all that the mainstream experimentalists have demonstrated
   is little more than a gestural interest in a raw material that they lack
   the commitment or the courage to fully explore. Their work is interesting
   as gallery experience but too often lacks the eloquence, even the basic
   ability to articulate at times, anything of genuine profundity. Henderson
   will not call himself a ceramic artist - he describes himself as an artist
   in fluxed earth, and whilst this fluxed earth is very obviously not only
   medium but also subject matter, he is always deeply concerned with that
   most important of all recurring traditional subjects in British art:
   landscape. For years his work consisted of landscape painting and
   vessel form sculptures, the two attacked with the same intensity, but then
   the vessel walls split and burst and began to explore the space around
   them, their place in landscape moved from the two dimensional to
   become the experience driving the work in clay. Painting and sculpture
   become one, and fluxed earth the medium for his landscape works, and
   he is making a very significant contribution to this art form.

   He has revealed new horizons of possibilities but he also emphatically
   demonstrates that one must be the master of one's art if one would be
   bold enough to eschew the safe banalities of mainstream contemporary
   internationalism and tread one's own road towards the making of
   meaningful statements. He is an artist in the old sense of being a
   complete master of his art, and in the new sense of not allowing that
   mastery to impede his progress or force him by any historic or
   traditional restrictions of usage to observe or obey any boundaries or
   limitations.

   Michael Robinson   1998


        
         by Roger Berthoud
         1995   hardcover