A look back at a life in ceramics

Sonja Landweer confounds our preconceived notions of ceramics and reveals a toughness of vision, an absolute unwillingness to settle for prettiness

SONJA LANDWEER is kind but tough, with a challenging, appraising eye, formidable presence and an assurance about her own work. This doesn’t stem from arrogance or egocentricity, however. While she has always come across as being exceptionally centred and self-contained, unfazed by the opinions of others, she is also clearly technically adept and rigorously demanding of herself.

Her bluntly titled retrospective, A Life's Work, is a tremendous exhibition, beautifully installed in Visual, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow. Landweer has an unerring feeling for fine, elegant form, for balance and poise, for texture and colour, mass and materials. Put all those qualities together and it would be easy to give a false impression of her work, to make it sound too cosily nice, especially given our preconceived notions about ceramics. All those descriptive terms are accurate, and more, but there is also a rugged, underlying darkness to her vision, linked to an archaic, even primeval element.

As ceramics expert Michael Robinson puts it, Landweer’s bowls are “more Japanese than Viennese in their expressionist explorations of fire and its participation in the creative process.”

She studied Far-Eastern pottery, and the aesthetic of the Japanese tea ceremony, in which the precision and delicacy of ritual is allied with expertly made but surprisingly rough-looking ceramic tea bowls, provides a good point of reference for her overall approach. She is not afraid to harness wild, almost uncontrollable processes and materials in pursuit of elegantly poised forms and surfaces. Both aspects are crucial and come through in the finished pieces.

This is borne out by her many experiments with novel glazes, detailed by Nicola Gordon Bowe in her meticulous, hugely informative catalogue essay. They include the “four-year development of a perilously exacting, painterly ‘batik’ technique”, as well as the employment of peat ash, iron and nickel – to tremendous effect. There is also Landweer’s use of unorthodox materials in some of her ceramics and in her body sculptures and related jewellery, including a range of feathers, sisal, torn paper, silk fabric and bones.

Landweer was invited to Ireland by the fledgling Kilkenny Design Workshops and, as artist-in-residence, was charged with nothing less than devising and developing an approach to ceramics reflective of the Irish cultural and environmental context rather than aping “English transfer ornamentation.” When she arrived, in 1965, she had already built a formidable reputation in her native Holland and, while she has lived in Ireland ever since, she has continued to exhibit her work in Holland.

There's a certain logic to this, because studio pottery as an art form is still more likely to be recognised abroad than here. That things have to some extent changed here – she is a member of Aosdána, for example – is due in no small part to her quiet but hugely influential presence, her teaching and encouragement. In 1988, Robinson could write of her, without exaggeration, that she was "the first major vessel maker to work in Ireland." Her work extends from quite conventional but breathtaking ceramic vessels, her Bowls with Serrated Footfrom 1974, for example, to the assertively sculptural but graceful bronzes, Conker and Totem(2008 and 2010), or the startlingly minimal, pure White Bowlsfrom 1981 to the Large Black Ovoidsfrom 1993, boldly expansive yet contained forms energised by molten-looking ribbons of gold leaf.

Quite recently Landweer commented of her own work: “My main concern over the years became how inner volume and outer boundary meet to create form.”

It's a good way of describing the tension that animates virtually everything she does. It's most obvious, perhaps, in her Seed Formsmade over several years from 1990 to 1993. These are polished, split ovoid forms, mostly earthenware, though one is in bronze. In each case the slit in the shape emphasises the nascent energy bound up within.

Several distinct bodies of work form A Life's Work. Each informs the others, however, and there is a cumulative richness to the exhibition that is very striking. While there is much to relish and admire in the details – the lustrous glazes, the sparing but intense use of colour, the rhythmic elegance of form in the monoprints – what emerges overall is that underlying toughness of vision, an absolute unwillingness to settle for prettiness.

A Life's Work,Sonja Landweer's sculptural and two-dimensional works. Also showing: The Coercion of Substance,New paintings by Samuel Walsh. Dreamlands: Printworksby Mary Cullen. Visual, Old Dublin Road, Carlow Tues-Sat 11am-5.30pm, Sun 2pm-5pm. Until January 8