Western Morning News (Saturday)
Unique art that could be out of this world...
Frank Ruhrmund looks at the work of ceramicist Geoffrey Swindell
Arecent guest on BBC TV’s The Great Pottery Throw Down and a potter who is no stranger to St Ives where his work has often been exhibited in the Porthminster Gallery, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that, although having being one of this country’s leading potters for sometime, Geoffrey Swindell actually began his long and successful career in art as a painter.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent, the centre of the Staffordshire pottery industries, upon leaving school in the early 1960s, he attended art college in order to get enough experience to apply to become an apprentice painter of Doulton figurines. It was after studying painting, and during a summer job at the pottery in Alton Towers that, inspired by all that he had seen and done there, he decided that his future career in art lay in pottery rather than painting. He would later complete his MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, and lecture at Cardiff College of Art , now Cardiff Metropolitan University, for several years. Samples of his work are now be found in more than forty museums and public collections from those in the UK, the Victoria & Albert Museum to the National Museum of Wales, and further afield from the Museum of Modern Art, USA, to the Museum of Applied Arts, Sydney, Australia.
As he says, his pottery still owes something to his painting.
“My first experience as an artist was as a painter, learning how to paint classic illustrative images and then moving on to canvases that were purely abstract expressions of emotion through colour and texture. When I became a potter I carried this involvement with surface qualities through to my ceramics, creating objects that are not just simply coated in glaze but have an essential and inseparable relationship of form and surface.
“I make all parts of the pieces on my potter’s wheel, creating a thick section to be trimmed and thinned with sharp steel tools when leather hard. Some of the pieces are textured by tapping the surface with a multi-pointed wire brush, ball ended tools and various sticks. The fine characterless texture and whiteness of porcelain gives a good bright ground to enhance the colour rather like a pure white canvas. I use an air brush to spray the surface of the forms with colours allowing me to build up overlapping layers of slip, glaze and oxides. Some people say my ceramics are like washed up sea creatures, some still alive, some just remnants turning slowly to dust. Others see unidentifiable objects from a far away galaxy, not sure whether they are organic, friendly or malevolent.”
Geoffrey Swindell’s art has been said to be unlike any other; a ceramicist original who has been making richly imaginative miniaturist art for some 40 years.
As urban as they are organic in feeling, his pieces express an essentially invented world, a personal domain we can all enjoy.
With St Valentine’s Day close at hand, it is easy to see why David Durham, director of the Porthminster Gallery, is presenting an online selection of his work.
He said: “While seeking a special Valentine’s Day gift, Geoffrey Swindell’s porcelain pieces are for you. Although the gallery is closed to visitors, we are open for business and sales online. Delivery throughout the UK and worldwide can still be easily arranged. See our website for details.”