In Gillian Lowndes’ late work, clay is not a compliant, domesticated material but a wild and living potion of minerals in the process of transformation. From the late 1970s until her death in 2010, Lowndes pushed back against the orthodoxies of ceramics. She shifted from making vessels and sculptural objects using more or less traditional techniques to combining clay with scrap metal, wire mesh, sand, loofahs, horsehair, lead and plastic hooks in freeform collages.
The Merseyside-born artist trained amid a radical cohort at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London during the 1950s, but her true creative transformation followed an 18-month trip to Nigeria in the late 1970s. In the works that followed, her formation in ceramics was still evident in her deft handling of materials, her use of clay and the kiln, but the resulting objects looked more like something excavated – whether by archaeologist or palaeontologist – than anything you’d encounter in a crafts shop.
