Gillian Lowndes (1936 – 2 October 2010) was an English ceramics sculptor. Born in Cheshire in 1936, she spent much of her childhood in British India. She studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts beginning in 1957 and spent a year at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1960.

In the early 1970s she traveled to Nigeria with her husband, Ian Auld, a trip that would prove to be influential in her subsequent work. From 1975 until the early 1990s, she taught part-time at Camberwell College of Arts and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Since the early 1960s and 70s her work has challenged the traditional notions surrounding the form of a vessel and fine art. Through her non-traditional experimental methods of incorporating found objects and materials such as wire and various objects from found in everyday life into her ceramic work, she continually challenges the orthodox world of pure ceramics.

Her mixed-media sculptures have been referred to as bricolage, or sculptures that utilize found objects to construct new meaning.

Lowndes used many different combinations and amalgamations of clay from fiberglass dipped in liquid porcelain slip to Egyptian paste in her work. Lowndes would often bury work made of Egyptian paste in sand during the firing using a saggar. After the initial firing she would then smash the pieces with a hammer and reassemble them with ceramic mortar or Nichrome wire.

Cups and tiles are added with extra glaze and act as “an affectionate backward glance at the pottery traditions (that of the Leach tradition) of form and technique from which Lowndes emerged.” Through the firing process, her work goes through odd, curious metamorphosis. When the work is finished, the fusion of the disparate parts rarely resembles the original piece with which she began.

She has said of her own work that it is the methods and materials that produce the ideas, not the other way round. The choice of materials and the assemblage of pieces lead her towards the object and this process gives her work a strangeness that is visually rich, yet her work is still rooted with the ceramic process and material.

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Related images

  1. Untitled, c. 1960, 14.5 x 13.5 x 8 cm, (GL-0045), Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe
  2. Installation shot, Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe
  3. Untitled, c. 1960, 14.5 x 13.5 x 8 cm, (GL-0045), Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe
  4. GL-0004, Untitled, c. 1990's, 24.5 x 21 cm, pen on handmade paper, Photography by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd, Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe
  5. Hook Figure, Spitalfields, 2008, Photography by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd, Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe
  6. GL-0011, Almost off the Wall (detail), 2001, 38 x 38 cm, slip dipped and fired matting, wire and bulldog clips, Photography by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd, Courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe