LyndaDraperWonderland& the Irony

ofMemoryArticle by Roderick Bamford

Kangaroo. 2008. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware. 13 x 20 x 12 cm. Photo courtesy of Gallerysmith.

4 Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 73 2008

IN THE SEAWARD SHADOW OF A COASTALescarpment south of Sydney, an old farm-house and studio embrace a concatenated

compilation of artifacts. The objects of this col-lection, gathered and imagined, have becomea well of inspiration for Lynda Draper, theirstories sustaining her fascination with thedomestic object.Draper’s early interpretations of these arti-

facts of the everyday engender a poetry ofform and usage. Her small sculptures imply asometimes bizarre functionality as moundsgive way to the fleshy organisation of tubesand vessels, admixed with fractions of thebotanical world. Draper describes the worksas evolving through “abstracting fromspecificobjects often from one source” and “fusingthem together to produce an object thatappears to have an identity of its own”.1The emerging synthesis coalesces the lan-

guage of pottery with companion forms of itsdomestic environment. Our familiarity withpottery in its most intimate domain empha-sises a powerful haptic and symbolic lan-guage, physically resonating with thecommunal spaces of the home.The ‘identity of its own’ referred to by

Draper provides a clue to the emerging inter-ests embodied in hermore recentwork. A lan-guageof thedomestic is activatedandchargedwith enquiry. The prominent traits of tactility,characteristic physical marks of raw interven-tion in Draper’s early work, give way to moredeliberate contrasts of texture. Remnants ofobjects of handledorigin are nowmorevaried,incorporating fingered undulations along-side dramatic indications of tooling,and amalgamated with the more genericsmoothed surface aesthetics of modern massproduction.The cumulative visual effect articulates a

more edgy yet subtle hybridity and broadensthe context thematically. The newer worksconjure images of sugary still lifes, metaphorsfor memories of comfort and intimacy associ-ated with childhood and the domestic space.Ourmemories are a formative part of our per-sonal autobiographical identities.José van Dijck2 reminds us that we use

objects and media as an interpretive way ofmaking meaning from our own experienceswithin the larger narratives of our history.Wedo this by inscribing experiences which facili-tate future recall.HerevanDijck is referring tothe emergence of digital media, and how,through its creative use, peoplemake sense oftheir own lives and connections to the lives of

St Joseph. 2007. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware. 28 x 10 x 10 cm.Photo courtesy of Gallerysmith.

Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 73 2008

others. Of course there is a filtering of these expe-riences through discursive conventions, social andcultural practices, and other technological tools. Wearemost familiar with this notion of filtering throughthe impacts of television, radio and the internet, butperhaps less so in the realmof the arts, and in particu-lar, the genre of still life.In the hands of artists, the projections of these expe-

riences are more practised, resulting in qualified andconsidered personal visions. Still life paintings oftenclosely imitate reality. But they also frequently con-tainmanydeepermeanings. Religious, economic, sci-entific and political beliefs and associations may beembedded in a single 16th century Dutch composi-tion of flowers or fruit. This type of mediation recallsthe work of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and the pot’s sig-nificance as a still life.3 The subtle yet significantvision behind the arrangement of her vessels appears

as a convolution of the genre’s object and subject.From the physicality of the pottery vessels them-selves emerges a semantic narrative more intimatethan that available through the pictorial representa-tion of painting. The written connection betweenHanssenPigott’s pots andMorandi’s paintings iswellestablished. Comments by David Whiting4 in hisintroduction to Hanssen Pigott’s 2004 exhibition atGalerie Besson alert us to the shortcomings of a staticstill life reading in relation to thatwork, observing thearrangement of pots and their delineation. “is one ofspatial pauses and intervals in the flow”.Both Hanssen Pigott’s and Draper’s work share a

sense of stillness characteristic of still life paintings, asif time has been frozen. Draper composes by selectingand arranging objects to create an order, using thequalities of light and surface to purify form. How-ever, the spaces inDraper’sworkdiffer in theway they

5

Dream Pony. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware. 16 x 18 x 12 cm. Photo courtesy of Gallerysmith.

6 Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 73 2008

link memory and time through usage. This is anothertype of flow. Ideas in her work are consolidated in sin-gle compositions rather thana series.A transformationoccurs in the way memories are re-envisaged or,perhaps more accurately, repositioned in the work,combining materiality, autobiography and popularsymbolism. Individualobjects coalesce.Theyare trans-formed and sintered into place, fused together by anillusoryglazedwhiteness, as if theyhadalways existedin that form. The sugarymattness of the glazed surfacesucks light into itswhiteness, denyingall but the tiniestintimate reflections. It saps and softens shadows, in-voking a personal and temporal almost edible quality.The flatness acts to isolate and defeature, integratingthe subjects as if they are sublime frozendioramas.As Robert Bell observes, Wonderland by Lynda

Draper, “takes us to the crystalline and fragmentedworld of memory. While its imagery conjures 19th-century parian porcelain grave ornaments and dis-connections of Lewis Carroll, this work also delightsthrough its evocation of the more transient art of theconfectioner in preparation for Easter”.Draper’s work impacts at the scale of iconography.

The small compositions could be scenes from a fairy-tale ormyth, but the symbolism is contemporary andsquarely located within the urban landscape of thelate 20th century. The space, as Draper explains, is ofa “ female growing up in 1960sAustralian suburbia”,where she reflects on the “childhood home our firstuniverse”.5 There is an ambiguity in the way thesesmall works appear temporal and sublime yet carryan enduring ceramic half-life, gifts of wonder thatreach back into memory and outwards into day-dream. The essence of the apparition invokedpromises a magical comfort, alluding to a place ofserenity and contentment, emphasised in someworks by their location in ceramic visions of anarcadian landscape.In her fascinating collection of essays, Longing,

Susan Stewart writes of souvenirs containing a typeof failed magic, arising from the unattainable natureof the origin of an “out-of-context object from thepastsurviving to the present”6, therefore denying its fulltransformation. Stewart also argues that in nostalgia,by ignoring or turning away from the here and now,we create an inauthentic condition of the present,

Still Life. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware. 7 x 16 x 6 cm.

Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 73 2008 7

falsely based on an idealised past of unattainablememories. Stewart builds a strong connectionbetween nostalgia and utopian desire, proposing thatits powermay “depend precisely on the irrecoverablenature of the past for its emotional impact andappeal”. Considered in this light, Draper’s worksoffer, perhaps nostalgically, a souvenir of our owncontemplations anddesires.But these souvenirs are conjured frommemories too

dreamy to be real. As if deliberately inauthenticatingthepast, thequixotic compositionscallonasublimatedmagic more akin to the eidetic gestures of GastonBachelard. In considering the bedroom of her child-hood home as a “shelter for imaging” and a “nest fordreaming”7, Draper calls onBachelard’s sanctuaries asa source of inspiration rather than a focus of lamentoften associatedwithnostalgia .The tranquil qualities in works such asDoe appear

to enact a grandmeditative narrative – an ideal vision

Above: Swan. 2007. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware.13 x 14 x 10 cm.Right:Wonderland. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware.18 x 15 x 16 cm.

8 Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 73 2008

anchored inmemory. Yet theworks appearmore sec-tarian than utopian, a teetering balance between theplayful and the sincere, not quite parodic. It is in thisspace of subtle irony8 that the tension in Draper’swork arises. Draper uses this strategy deliberately,blurring the interpretation of the narrative within aframework of familiar symbolism and the still lifegenre, wishing to maintain a mystery and evoke thedream-like quality ofmemory.9There is another irony here that as change moves

rapidly, shortening the cycling sequences of innova-tion and obsolescence, nostalgia needs to be continu-ally updated, to a point where, as the postmoderntheorist Fredric Jameson puts it, we can suffer a “nos-talgia for the present”.10 Perhaps it is here, in its soft

edginess, that Draper’s work is most persuasive;where contrasted stereotypes of utopian mass con-sumption clash with personal memories and ide-alised identities conveyed through our exposure tomedia. It delicately reveals the conundrum of ouridentity in a fast-changingworld.REFERENCES:1. Quotations from interviewswith the artist.2. Van Dijck, José, ‘Memory Matters in the Digital Age’,Configurations, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp.349–373.

3. Conversation with Gwyn Hanssen Pigott at theopening of the exhibition where she first showed thegrouped vessel forms in the early 1990s in Brisbane,Australia .

4. Whiting, David,Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Galerie Besson 2– 30 June 2004.

5. Stilgoe, John, Introduction to, Bachelard, Gaston, ThePoetics of Space, p viii, 1994, Beacon Press.

6. Stewart, S. Longing, DukeUniversity Press, 1993, p 151.7. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 1994. BeaconPress, p. 5.

8. The capacity of both nostalgia and irony to create ten-sion. In her essay, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmod-ern’ Linda Hutcheon draws parallels between thestructures of irony and nostalgia, observing that a typeof friction between the present and the past also existsin the ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’ opposites of irony.

9. Conversationwith LyndaDraper, July 2007.10. Jameson, Fredric, Nostalgia for the Present, The SouthAtlantic Quarterly, volume 88,Number 2, 1989, p. 527.

Roderick Bamford is a ceramic artist from NSW and a lecturerat COFA, University of New South Wales. Lynda Draper isrepresented by Gallerysmith, Melbourne (including websitegallerysmith.com.au), Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney, andGalerie Marianne Brand, Geneva, Switzerland. She currentlyteaches at CeramicDesign Studio, Sydney Institute TAFE.

Doe. 2008. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware. 13 x 20 x 12 cm. Photo courtesy of Gallerysmith.

Still Life. 2006. Handbuilt porcelaneous stoneware.16 x 21 x 12 cm.