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| Sonja Landweer: Cretan Knot necklace from ongoing Lightweight Adornment series, c. 1988, assorted beads and nylon and other threads, c. 50 cm. in diameter; artist’s photographSonja Landweer: Inverted Seed Form, 1993, handbuilt, oval ceramic vessel, earthenware, painted and polished black with added gold leaf, 21 x 27.5 cm. on marble stand 5 x 25 x 15cm; photo Ron Zijlstra; courtesy of the artist |
Sonja Landweer: Paper Rhythm, c. 1990, loop necklace, black felt, bone, feathers, assorted beads and fibres, including nylon thread, overall length c. 45 cms; artist’s photograph |
"Vessels of the Soul"1:
An Introduction to the
Versatile Art of Sonja Landweer
in Ireland, 1965-99
Although Sonja Landweer is best known as a potter, whose forms and glazes reflect her artistic concepts and responses to nature, her contribution to Irish craft and design has been broader than is generally realised. Pioneering designs for ceramic production, exhibitions, textiles and fashion accessories preceded 'body sculpture', symbolic vessels and jewellery.
Sonja Landweer arrived in Ireland nearly thirty-five years ago from her native Holland, bringing a distinguished international reputation as a studio potter and ceramic artist with her. After setting up a studio in her native Amsterdam in 1954, she had been exhibiting, initiating enlightened educational schemes for children with fellow artists, and experimenting as widely then as she has continued to do ever since with her chosen medium of clay. As long as she was working on the wheel (which she did until 1982), her lifelong interest in the natural world, in the colour and texture of landscape, in the organic details of plants and seeds, found formal expression in circular vessels and extraordinarily inventive glazes. Her technical prowess, artistic integrity and disciplined commitment have been matched only by her inspired versatility, practical resourcefulness and relentless quest for the forms and surfaces she needs. Her increasing interest in seeking symbolic forms as concretions of subconscious emotions is an extension of her long-held fascination with the nature of materials.The poet Seamus Heaney, in dedicating his poem To a Dutch Potter in Ireland to Landweer2, has evoked a passionate world of elemental alchemy which only she, a lifetime initiate, can activate. The painter Barrie Cooke recalls the reaction of veteran potters in Stoke-on-Trent3, at first begrudging when she wanted to try out an electric wheel before buying it from them, but then stunned at her masterful throwing once she sat down. This skill has informed every aspect of her work--whether vessel-forming, sculpting, firing, mixing and applying glazes, through batik, jewellery-making from beads, slate, wood, paper, feathers, bone, leather and other fibres, to designing fashion accessories. There is a leitmotif running through everything she has ever done, whether painting, drawing, print-making, ceramics, textiles or jewellery, in finding the specific material or technique particularly suited to each at a given time. Thus, for example, even before she left Amsterdam, the batiks on silk she made as dress fabrics for Wilhelmina, then Queen of Holland, had led to four years of experimentation until she evolved a perilously exacting batik technique on layers of raw glazed clay. For many people in Ireland, the deep, rich colours swathing impossibly tiny-footed, seemingly floating bowls with ever wider rims still represent her work at its zenith.In 1964, she was awarded the Dutch National Resistance Prize for her total ceramic oeuvre, as well as being an invited guest potter at the Finnish ceramics company, Arabia in Helsinki. The following year, Landweer was invited to set up a ceramic studio at the Kilkenny Design Workshops (KDW); this had been formed in 1963 by Córas Tráchtála (CTT, the enlightened Irish Export Board) in response to the 1962 advisory report commissioned from five eminent Scandinavian designers, but was not officially opened until November 1965 (see Paul Caffrey article also in this supplement, pages 7-9). The report recommended that a practical training centre of experienced designers, craftspeople and technicians be set up in an autonomous interactive community in the country to train native talent, to aim at proving design work "in prototype before it was adopted by industry," while focusing on the craft-based industries "since it was in crafts that the Irish public were most likely to come into contact with and understand the designer and his work."4 A particular directive was to "explore the potential" of indigenous materials like local pottery clays "which were not in commercial use" and thus develop a sense of national design identity through informed research.Thus it was that Landweer and Barrie Cooke went to live in County Kilkenny, ultimately in a large ramshackle house at Jerpoint, which became a bohemian hive of creative activity. For both of them, nature was "the primary reality" and they lived in nature "remote in kind from the craft-oriented vision of William Morris."5 There she used a big gas kiln. Meanwhile Cooke took the "rough, crudely fired, unglazed" textures of the "folds of clay" he had used for "the earthy, concentrated, immensely physical presences"6 of the landscape-set Sheela-na-gigs (fired in Landweer's kiln in Amsterdam) and reworked them into powerfully sculptural fired clay and oil images of living organic growth around the River Nore.Landweer embarked on what turned out to be pioneering, exhaustive experimentation with "distinctive new"7 glazes, methodically exemplified and recorded for KDW, who had set her up in their workshop complex in Castle Yard. In the space used there as a shop and exhibition space, Landweer and Cooke collaborated on a 12ft by 8 ft mural, The Honeyed Ramparts of her Hair8, composed of three-dimensional green-glazed ceramic watery shapes set into plaster-coated panels supported with copper rods. Her technical skill enabled her to fire this and Cooke's subsequent acrylic-painted, white clay, high-fired ceramic Bone Box pieces, while her research led her all over the country, as she investigated geological deposits for suitable materials, such as a peat-ash glaze project. Unfortunately, attempts to make these glazes industrially viable left little of their original, painstakingly-achieved quality or texture; furthermore, her glaze samples were 'borrowed' and adulterated outside the Workshops. She did, however, continue to freelance for the Workshops, giving glaze consultations, visiting small pottery workshops and advising on design displays. This followed her innovative orchestration of individual craftmakers' work with traditionally crafted items like willow calf muzzlers, wooden curraghs, potato creels and donkey whips for Mr. Joyce's craft shop in converted barracks at Killary in Connemara--a radical departure from the ubiquitous shamrocks, crystal chandeliers and shillelaghs. Her earliest jewellery dates from this time, when she herself made intricately turned, pierced and underglazed ceramic beads for KDW to sell as handmade necklaces. All the while she was actively engaged in throwing, glazing, exhibiting, teaching, biodynamic workshops, advising emerging craftworkers, and assessing and jurying in Ireland and in Holland.Early in 1967 Landweer held her first solo exhibition in Ireland at Dublin's Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. This included 26 batiked ceramic vessels made over the past three years, while an exhibition of Dutch Contemporary Art in Ireland at the Municipal Gallery the same year included 96 'soft stoneware' pieces, loaned by CTT. In 1969, 1971 and 1972, David Hendriks gave her further solo shows, of batiked and other ceramic pieces, all for sale, while her work continued to be documented, exhibited and collected internationally. One critic, regretting that her pieces were "too valuable to dare to pick up" or use, commented:Miss Landweer is now a collector's potter. In fact a potter's potter...Long stems of dark stoneware are crowned with sub-minaret shapes, suffused with...sometimes as many as seven superimposed [glazes]...She uses a lot of nickel in her colouring--this can give an infinite spectrum of colours--and also uses wax...to waver the effect. Unlike normal stoneware, hers is fine to the point of fragility: to achieve this without warping lips or curling edges means throwing away scores of cracked duds. She nevertheless succeeds in achieving a very strong sense of form.9 Her concern to reflect landscape and its changing seasons through texture and colour led to a rich array of glazes and forms, among which were seed forms on stacked 'stem' segments, sold in detachable 'family' groups to emphasize their adaptable spatial relationships in which the buyer could participate. Her desire to make her shapes appear to float horizontally led not only to ever--widening rims but to increasingly ruched basal feet, as though springing up. Michael Robinson's New Ceramics show at the Ulster Museum in 1974 indicated the increasingly complex, sculptural approach towards clay of three skilled 'artist potters', Jacqueline Poncelet, Peter Simpson and Landweer (the only one from outside Britain). Of Landweer's bowls, lidded pots and pots fetishistically incorporating feathers, he wrote:Her work shows a knowledge of the qualities of clay and glazes, and a perfectionist control of them that few artists attain in any medium...However, her pottery is not just an end in itself, it is part of an expression of life and a personality that has many interests and involvements...integrated...in a combined or mixed media expression.10 He also ascribed the "refinement and meticulous attention to detail" in her "skilful, systematic and disciplined approach" to a specifically Dutch inheritance of potting and decoration, although she was by now firmly rooted in Ireland, at Jerpoint House, part of which is still her base. At the World Crafts Council's 1979 European landmark exhibition, The Bowl, she was one of only four artist-craftsmen selected in Ireland to represent "excellence of design and workmanship."11By the end of the 70s, feeling trapped by her reputation for beautiful glazes and porcelain-thin bowls, she purposely began to concentrate on shapes based on flowerheads, covered temporarily with plain, greenish-white glazes. What captivated her was the contracted form left when petals are shed and the plant's energy is sucked from the periphery into the hidden base of the stem, ready to make seeds for the coming year. Thus, the feet of her earlier pots became anthropomorphically sucked into vessel forms, whose tightly concentrated, embryonic bases were designed to stand on simple blocks of wood while, in contrast, rims were thrown wide open above a clearly demarcated, incised and waisted ridge. Seemingly translucent layers of rich autumnal colours returned to her bowls, but she was still searching for fitting means to appropriately synthesize her formal responses as a mediator of surrounding natural, personal and intuitive rhythms. The next ten or so years were to be a period of withdrawal, of drawing and print-making, of gestation for symbolic guardian angel, ear and wing forms, which led to the Seed Forms, Small Matters, and Tokens of the early 90s. The small scale of these immensely thoughtful, tangible vessels sculpted (not thrown or glazed) in clay belied their monumental treatment, their totemic forms denoting seminal rites of passage. Bound within puckered, fungoid-inspired pouches, Small Matters suggested transitional retreat; Tokens12, ominous dolmen crags of chunky clay spliced with jagged slate, suggested separation, painful transformation and ritual initiation; Seed Forms, which ranged from heavy, imploded, nearly closed black vessels with swollen lips, hand-built (not thrown), sanded, highly polished, sometimes enlivened by goldleaf seams, and small, tightly clenched, embryonic, ovoid Future Seed Forms, stranded on Kilkenny limestone blocks13, which invite the human touch. These pieces, on which she is still working, represent Landweer's hard-won attempts to "make unseen creative space tangible,"14 to evoke the visionary dynamic of life-giving energy out of chaos.In 1988, Landweer began to exhibit Arcane Body Ornaments at the Dublin Taylor Gallery and at the Heltzel Gallery15 in Kilkenny, David Hendriks having died in 1983. Extending her fascination with shamanistic transformation symbolized by 'primitive' assemblages of found materials, she skilfully worked deliberately non-precious, indigenous slate, bone, leather, metals, horn, paper, straw, sisal and clay into beautiful, fragile, but wearable forms, sometimes enhanced with amber, jasper, agate, soapstone or beads. Some, as in her Crescents: Stoneware Bodysculpture show, invoked her earlier Friendly Feathered Demons, bondaged, uddered receptacles, sprouting feathers and mounted in protective pots, or the simple austere forms and polished surfaces of her Seed Form pots. Others, in her Lightweight Adornment and Paper Rhythms exhibitions, showed her using a range of paper textures, weights and surfaces built up with exquisitely deft inventiveness. In 1995, a trip to Crete reinforced her interest in ethnic forms and led to a new series of "prickly,"16 knotted jewellery. Her work can always be seen in Dublin's DesignYard in their international display, and is increasingly being featured in major exhibitions in Holland, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany, where jewellery has long been considered an autonomous art form.Landweer continues to push boundaries, not only in her adoptive and native lands, as she feels her way towards new forms, still primarily in clay, but always "within that aura which belongs to sacred objects" and keeps "intact the spirit and insight and mastery of the woman who made them."17
Acknowledgments: Primarily to Sonja Landweer; also to Michael Robinson, Diane Tomlinson, Mary Boydell, Catherine Marshall, Mairead Dunlevy, Rosemarie and Sean Mulcahy, Patricia Jorgensen, Jennifer Trigwell, Nicholas Mosse, David Willis, Anne Hodge, Anthony Hobbs, Patrick Bowe, Antoinette Murphy, Deirdre McLoughlin, Carmen Hijosa, Barrie Cooke, Michael Walsh-Kemmis, Beppie Feuth, Paul Caffrey, Mary Dowling, Gordon Lambert.
Nicola Gordon Bowe is a Lecturer in History of Art and Design and supervisor of the proposed M.A. course in Applied Arts at N.C.A.D.; she is a writer, lecturer and critic, particularly on twentieth-century decorative arts.
