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.
The small display Radical Clay at the Holburne Museum spans Lowndes’ late career, from the 1980s to 2008. In this genteel Georgian setting her works look rude and punky. Scrollscape With Fork (2001) suggests a diabolical layer cake that has curled up to consume a piece of cutlery. Thin layers, like curling sheets of black shale, carry a furry crust as though caught midway through a chemical reaction as mineral crystals leached from their surface. It recalls works by the Italian Arte Povera artist Gilberto Zorio, who worked with reactive metals and salts. But here there are no vats of chemicals, nor thrusting rods. Lowndes’ modest work is more intriguing for not explaining its workings.
Hanging Scroll (1995) resembles a precisely coiled medical bandage, suspended like a flying saucer halfway down the wall on a thick cable. Crude masonry nails plundered from an old building are sandwiched between the layers, yet there is an illusion of lightness to this object. You can peer over it and see through the gaps between the layers. How does it hang together? It seems to be stitched. Is it cloth dipped in clay? Or porcelain thinned, coiled and stitched to resemble a bandage? It’s an impossible object. One that certainly shouldn’t be able to float like this.
I’ve seen similar coils, similar assemblages in the 2022 Turner prize-winning display of Veronica Ryan’s work. Her coil was a cloth strip packed with heavy seeds. The two works are siblings to the eye but not the hand, yet I feel Lowndes has influenced Ryan, with her interest in found objects and the economy of means. Indeed, Lowndes’ unruly multipart sculptures and her roving exploration of freaky methodologies are very much of a part with the current generation of sculptors working with ceramics.
She dances a fine line with representation. It is hard not to see Almost Off the Wall (2001) as a face – a mask of folded blackened strips covered in crusting white and secured by (or perhaps fused to) bulldog clips. The wild eyebrows are bunched wire, the heavy forehead a scroll of sand-dusted black clay, and the mouth a black and white tablet. A craze of wire serves as hair and unpretentiously hooks the work to the wall.
Fossily, fishy forms proliferate, made, at a guess, by saturating loofahs in clay then burning out the vegetable matter in the kiln. At the pointed end of each loofah she’s wrapped wire mesh saturated with black clay, from which emerges a white plastic hook like the stinger on a scorpion’s tail. Two of these etiolated marine forms – the Hook Figures (2008) – dangle from nails like desiccated alligators or stingray tails. They look less like hunting trophies than long dead things found on the beach. But those lolling stingers carry an edge of menace.
Another lies down one side of Hook Figure With Cage (1991). It’s attached to a double-height cage, layered and complex as a lobster pot. Terraces of wire mesh inside the cage have tufts of coloured clay emerging like pinkish carpet. At first I thought the dry curling matter inside was strips of orange peel, then I guessed pieces of scavenged lobster shell. On closer inspection they seemed to be fine thin strips of white clay dyed hazy orange. They are very precisely rendered to look like organic detritus. Lowndes lavished an equal amount of care on junk. In Another Cup of Tea (2005), a squashed tea strainer is transformed into exhumed animal with yawning clay-clad gums.
Lowndes questions the assumption that clay and metal are “dead” and fixed. Instead, she offers a deep, geological view that all things are temporary and in flux if you have the patience to sit with them long enough.
• At Holburne Museum, Bath, until 21 April.
