Sculpting the Earth: Ceramics by Natalie Bevan, Psiche Hughes & Ann Stokes

The Holburne Museum is delighted to present Sculpting the Earth, a new exhibition which brings together the ceramic works of three women artists of the 20th century: Natalie Bevan, Psiche Hughes and Ann Stokes. Curated by Chris Stephens, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to discover little-known artists’ witty and suggestive approaches to modelling in clay.

 

Rather than working within the utility-based traditions of studio pottery, or the conventions of the mainstream art world, the ceramic art of all three artists finds echoes in the charming, figurative output of 18th-century porcelain factories such as Meissen in eastern Germany, and Bow, one of the first in England, examples of which are held in the Holburne’s own collection. The exhibition highlights an alternative ceramic tradition that challenges established hierarchies of art and craft.

Though her work was rarely exhibited publicly, Ann Stokes (1922-2014) was a well-known presence in a particular circle of the London art world. Her works included vibrant plates and cups intended for use, as well as stand-alone, figurative pieces: animals, particularly birds, ceramic and plywood trees, her husband in the bath. She combined figures and function in, for example, tureens in the form of a fish, blurring the boundary between utility and ornament.

Natalia Bevan (1909–2007), whose clay figures include circus elephants, mythological scenes such as Leda and the Swan, and domestic subjects, like a mother breast-feeding her baby, had just one solo exhibition in her lifetime – at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1967. Otherwise, her practice was sustained in private and known largely through her friends and family.

Psiche Hughes’ (1939-2018) ceramic practice, which saw her produce vibrant, figurative works, was an adjunct to her work as an academic and translator specialising in Latin American literature. The pieces focus on representational imagery – animals, fruits and vegetables, buildings. Her work, like that of Bevan and Stokes, lies outside the bounds of formal art education, and yet belongs to a clear tradition of humorous ceramic sculpture in the modern period.

Together these three artists demonstrate an intuitive approach to image making, modelling and firing clay to produce forms that are humorous and insightful reflections of aspects of the external world they saw or imagined. Each demonstrates how creativity can exist alongside other activities, all three of them being neither a part of, nor completely separate from, the structures of the art and craft milieu.

 

Image credit: Psiche Hughes, 'Pelican'