A dance and play in space

According to Hepworth Wakefield curator, Abi Shapiro, it would seem that British studio ceramics is having a renaissance, in which narratives can be reassessed and perhaps new stories told. In recent years, museums and galleries have celebrated some of the masters of the material (Magdalene Odundo at Hepworth Wakefield, Lucie Rie at Kettle’s Yard, Jacqueline Poncelet at MIMA, Gillian Lowndes at the Holburne…to name just a few) and often in an effort to cement ceramics’ decades-long realignment as a sculptural medium. Elizabeth Fritsch is one such artist that would embrace this renewed institutional view of ceramics and as such, is the subject of a new survey exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, Elizabeth Fritsch: Otherworldly Vessels.

Fritsch is not a potter nor a ceramicist; she is a painter that makes pots. Her painted surfaces are illusory and graphic, simple geometries that carve out space on an apparently flat surface. Upon the canvas this would recall cubist or surrealist painting trends, to draw attention to the spaceless-ness of the pictorial vista while nodding to the object-ness of the canvas.

On Fritsch’s pots the imagined depth of the painted surface interacts with the very real volume of the vessel, an internal void contained by thin clay walls. Fritsch called this working in two and a half dimensions, but it resonates with theories in 20th-century abstract art of the ‘fourth dimension’ as an extension of perceived space. It is undeniable then to contemplate Fritsch’s work as more than just pots.

The Hepworth Wakefield seems well placed to host such an artist. When the gallery opened in 2011, it inherited the city’s art collection, which included a small but significant pool of British studio ceramics, within the context of a largely sculptural holding. Accordingly, the Hepworth Wakefield has endeavoured to examine the intersection between sculpture and ceramics, a precedent set by the gallery’s namesake when sculptor Barbara Hepworth, with fellow sculptor Henry Moore, notably exhibited with potter William Staite Murray. As such, the Hepworth Wakefield has a strong track record for presenting ceramics as a sculptural medium rather than just as a subversion of the medium of pottery.

ARTISTIC RHYTHM

Elizabeth Fritsch: Otherworldly Vessels gathers over 100 works drawn mostly from Fritsch’s studio (supplemented with key loans from institutions and private collections), a personal selection that she sees as the best examples of her work, held back from sale and mostly from exhibition – as such, many of these works have never been seen before, or at least, never in the arrangements presented here. Although spanning the breadth of her practice, the earliest work dates from 1974 and the latest from 2013, the exhibition does not aim to describe a beginning nor end to her working life.

Whilst the exhibition is not envisioned as a chronological retelling, it opens with Fritsch’s early efforts to find her artistic rhythm. Her pots demonstrate her love of music, dance and colour as well as surrealism and literature, even into physics and quantum systems – her painted patterns express the relationships of forms and structures in such systems. The exhibition frames this through Fritsch’s first UK solo exhibition, held at the Crafts Council at Waterloo Place in 1974. The exhibition took place just three years after the artist’s graduation from the Royal College of Art and set out a vocabulary of forms that became the schema for her entire artistic output: pots, bowls, vases, goblets, bottles, jars, spouts, and moon pockets. The exhibition showed incredible confidence in her setting out of forms, to create and follow through with this visual credo, and in doing so develop a renowned aesthetic.

From here, the exhibition is organised in clustered groups, not by time, type or topic but in Fritsch’s curated arrangements. The artist is particular about the spacing of her works, meticulous down to the tiniest millimetre, the connections and negative spaces between energise the objects. The artist says: ‘The spaces between pots assembled in groups is, to me, more lovely and musical than any of the spatial relationships that may be incorporated into an individual piece. These groups are
I suppose like movements in classical music – in which the arrangement adds up, hopefully, to more than the sum of its parts…enabling a dance and play in space.’ This curatorial rationale is perhaps intentionally a little mysterious and reflects an instinctive approach to the display of her works mirrored in her attitude to making.

IMPROVISED EXPRESSIONS

Accordingly, Otherworldly Vessels also touches on Fritsch’s seminal touring exhibition Pots about Music of 1978, which began at Leeds Art Galleries and was subsequently shown in Glasgow, Bristol, Gateshead, Bolton and finally at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. That exhibition and its representation here illuminate Fritsch’s life-long interest in music. Herself a trained musician in the harp and piano, she has been continually influenced by the structures in classical music and the improvised expression of jazz. She has often spoken of her pots in the same manner, a timely response to a feeling or moment, in this way her work is improvised, never planned out or sketched beforehand, and therefore impossible to replicate.

The exhibition also includes works from the Hepworth Wakefield collection by artists close and influential to the artist. For example, a large Ben Nicholson painting demonstrates Fritsch’s keen attention to his use of colour and overlapping geometric pattern. Fritsch credits much of her learning to Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, by whom she was taught in her early student days, and both are represented in the exhibition. Rie taught Fritsch much about practical technique and firing, herself a master at single-fired works, Coper was, however, the defining influence in Fritsch’s education, appreciating the difference but acknowledging her as a painter rather than a potter, reconciling the form of the pots and the abstract patterns upon them.

Although she calls herself ‘self-taught’ – her first pots were coiled at her kitchen table and fired in a domestic oven following a passing encounter with pottery during a teaching degree – encouragement from the likes of Rie and Coper, as well as Eduardo Paolozzi and David Queensbury at the Royal College of Art, drove Fritsch’s determination to define herself as an artist against the mostly Leachian narrative of ceramics.

The exhibition culminates in sections that explore her technique, as seems inevitable in a ceramics exhibition, and the wider ceramic and art world around her. Archival photography of the artist from the 1970s depicts pots coiled and pinched into three-dimensions and describe her fastidious nature and obsession with details, down to the specifics of a glaze or grog recipe. An illustrated timeline shows chronologically personal milestones and contextual events, giving wider insight into Fritsch’s artistic orbit.

Otherworldly Vessels, Hepworth Wakefield, 8 March–spring 2026; hepworthwakefield.org

Images:  Adrian Sassoon, London. © Photography by Sylvain Deleu

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