GILLIAN LOWNDES (BRITISH 1936-2010) §
FLAT CERAMIC WITH TEA STRAINER
£1,764
Auction: Modern Made Day 2 - Lots 124 to 456 - Friday 02 May at 10:30
Description
found objects, porcelain and wire
Dimensions
29cm long (11 3/8in long)
Provenance
Contemporary Applied Arts, London, 1994;
Collection of Professor John Chambers.
Footnote
Gillian Lowndes called herself a "gatherer of impedimenta" - a phrase that perfectly describes her raw, junk-infused sculptures. Her chaotic yet compelling assemblages, where everyday detritus - tea strainers, bulldog clips, loofahs, hammerheads, and kiln cones - merge through fire, glue, and brute force were truly radical, as with the current two works.
From the late 1970s, Lowndes fired disparate materials at extreme temperatures, sometimes fusing them, sometimes smashing and reassembling them. Her Brick Bag series, inspired by London’s 1978–79 refuse strike, saw bricks wrapped in fiberglass tissue, while her Hook Figures - loofahs dipped in porcelain and fired - leave behind eerie skeletal husks. Straddling craft and fine art, her work has more in common with Eva Hesse’s experimental sculpture than with traditional studio pottery.
Though largely overlooked in her lifetime, interest in Lowndes has surged posthumously, with major exhibitions and a 2012 monograph. Yet as was noted at the Holburne Museum exhibition Radical Clay in 2024 her work remains one of the art world’s ‘best kept secrets’ - perhaps because it resists easy categorization. Strange, awkward, and poetic, her assemblages seem less like art objects than relics of a lost future, unearthed from the ruins of our own making.