Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor
April 30 – July 10, 2005
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, IL 60602
This process is intuitive, not intellectual.
You have to learn to be spontaneous
and trust yourself.
-Ruth Duckworth (1)
Looking like archaeological pieces dug up from the subconscious, the ceramic sculpture of Ruth Duckworth releases a powerful sense of human instinct. Her modestly sized works in this exhibit often emanate a monumental certitude that moors us back into basic states of intuition. This is something of a radical achievement in a contemporary world that has become increasingly fragmented by technology, media, and commercialism. A great many of her sculptures produced over the last five decades often feel as though they have existed for centuries, and exude a sense of timelessness which seems to make a mockery of postmodern impermanence and ephemerality by comparison. It is clear that Duckworth’s firmly rooted ties to the European Modernist tradition of sculpture explains her astonishing ability to continually reinvent and integrate the forms and motifs she creates. Her tale of artistic development and self-discovery is intertwined with her personal history of exile, survival, and self-reinvention in three different countries.
Ruth Windmuller was born in 1919 to Jewish and Lutheran parents in a suburb of Hamburg. As a sickly child she was often isolated in her bedroom where she spent much time drawing. The deterioration of her family’s middle class fortunes corresponded to the rise of ever more strident anti Semitism in Germany and Ruth fled to England on her seventeenth birthday in 1936. It was at this terrible time that art helped her emotionally. “I was a rather depressed young woman of 17 or 18” she recalls, “My favorite artists were Rembrandt and Dürer and the poet Rilke. And these things got me over my depression. I thought if they can do this for me maybe I could do this for other people.” (2)
Another decisive experience in Ruth’s career happened while she was working for a munitions factory in England during World War II. She was taking a short break working the night shift when she had a mysterious and unforgettable epiphany about space.
I was looking at the night sky…and suddenly the sky changed completely. Instead of being a star beside a star it became this three dimensional thing: it was staggering this thing …I wasn’t even existing I was so small. This made a fantastic impression on me and I’ve loved space ever since…. It had a definite spiritual dimension. (3)
In a recent interview the artist talked about ceramics and this cosmic aspect of space.
Sixty years ago…I started working in clay. I lived in a hostel for refugees for a while, run by the Quakers. I had a tiny little room to work in…I imagined whether what I was making would be ten miles out into space…and if it could survive being out in this fantastic space then it was OK. That was my criteria. (4)
For 28 years she worked in England and strove to discover her instinctive expressive abilities. For the first four to five years she worked as a stone carver, which explains why she “found it so easy to break the rules” (5) when she dedicated herself to ceramics. Ruth had important artistic contact with the Modernist sculptor Henry Moore whose sculpture reflected an interest in primitive art and biologically based forms: these became key aspects of her own artistic dynamic. She also had an extraordinary regard for Constantin Brancusi and his ability to essentialize and simplify forms that were discovered through instinct. Isamu Noguchi and Barbara Hepworth were other important mainstream Modernist sculptors who were inspirational. Ruth’s encounter with the expatriated Austrian ceramic artist Lucie Rie in the mid 1940’s was also of critical importance and began a lifelong friendship. In 1949 she married Aidron Duckworth, a fellow artist and designer whose career developed alongside her own until they divorced in 1966.
Duckworth made many trips to the vast collections of primitive art and art of antiquity on display at the British Museum. These objects became seminal to her artistic development, particularly Egyptian art and the prehistoric Cycladic figures, which are thought to be female fertility symbols. Primitive stone and Bronze Age axes and implements also became important forms in her work, sometimes finding their way onto the heads of her totemic figures. In the mid 1950’s under enlightened teachers at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts Ruth’s investigations into ceramics as inventive sculpture flourished. In 1965 she received an invitation to teach at Chicago’s Midway Studios at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. It was a decision that lead to her to make the city her permanent home.
Many of her ceramic pieces are investigations which experiment with the inner spaces of cups and bowls and revealing fresh evocative form beyond the utilitarian purposes that ceramics had traditionally been tied to. Like other important women sculptors such as Louise Bourgeois and Lee Bontecou, the subconscious played a role in the evolution of her work, particularly through the abstract suggestion of the female body. The artist has commented on the importance of a time she underwent psychoanalysis while she was in England: it was a process which allowed her to let her unconscious “well up” to become part of her art. Breast and womb are suggested through swelling bulges and curves and incisions became vulva like cleavages; these simple elements conferred a sense of instinctive sexuality and elemental fertility. This is quality is readily apparent in her series of cleaved vessels called Mama Pots. The primitive evocation of her work is enhanced by the use of glazes to suggest earthy textures and weathering, giving the feeling that the piece had been excavated from an ancient site. Her use of muted tones and simple clean forms were directly inspired by the English Modernist sculpture, and reinvigorated ideas about what American ceramics could be. The multiplicity of shapes that exist in of Duckworth’s sculptures are also inspired by the fecundity of forms that exist in nature such as seed pods and birds. She gathers these inspirations from her travels to different environments as well as her extensive private garden in Chicago.
An untitled square wall sculpture from 2002 is a masterful example of Duckworth’s capacity to both abstractly and surrealistically suggest body and landscape at once: to combine Modernist purity with cosmic mystery. Thin square plates of gently curving ceramic float above a similar flat ceramic plane, and hover like geometric clouds that cast grey shadows. Open breaches in the surface reveal two pregnant teardrops, which may also be eggs or breasts, and are attached to the top of the composition. A black vessel in the center suggests an infinite void that is at once cosmic, frightening and mute: darkness embodied. In many of Duckworth’s wall reliefs and vessels thin white shelves of porcelain partially expose organic forms just behind then, serving to both shroud and reveal some biological secret within. This game of surface and layers that reveal and hide space is where much of Duckworth’s uniquely personal expression in ceramic form emanates. Convexes, cavities, and holes create the silent mystery of some kind of inner sanctum and can suggest the sense of body and landscape simultaneously. In a recent interview Duckworth mentioned “There’s always something going on inside that you can’t see. You get just a hint of it. And that makes you more curious; gives more energy to the piece.” (6)
There are a number of important porcelain works on display from the artist’s brilliant and inspiring Cup and Blade series. These pieces play with pristine bowl and cup shapes that are variously bisected by one or more geometric planes of porcelain. The effect is often one of geometric purity and weightlessness, often achieving a Suprematist inspiration of unearthly planes that are levitating in space. The Cup and Blade series is a remarkable testament to the High Modernist achievement of essentializing spirit. Like Brancusi, Duckworth succeeds in creating a sense of cosmic vastness in an object of modest scale
Though Duckworth rarely names her pieces (most of them are untitled) one piece entitled The Spirit of Survival depicts an abstract and simplified bird form based on a heron. The title suggests a metaphor for Duckworth’s own tenacious physical and spiritual survival in three different cultures and countries. The artist has often commented on the importance of play as the creative font of her artistic dynamic.
Play is the essence of creativity. Creative play and gut reaction, instinct. When I work on a piece I play. I have a whole huge section of the studio where I have an inventory of sculptural forms, simple abstract, non-specific shapes that I find beautiful and enjoy making. Then I start building these shapes together. And then I find myself smiling. I say “hello! I think I’ve got something. The process is intuitive, not intellectual. You have to learn to be spontaneous and trust yourself. (7)
It is instructive seeing how Duckworth’s art represents a true capacity to integrate form while creating a genuine artistic identity. The longevity of her predominately Modernist roots contrast with the ephemeral life cycles of art based on postmodern theoretical endgames that are ubiquitous today. “Everything I do should have some timeless something about it: that’s what I would like.”(8) It is an honor that Chicago has been graced by the presence of such an artist of true Modernist conviction and longevity. In an age when natural instinct and the body are so easily displaced, fragmented, even denied Ruth Duckworth remains self sufficient in her individuality and singularity; a testament to her instinct to survive.
1. Jo Lauria Ruth Duckworth Modernist Sculptor p. 76, Lund Humphries in association with Art Options Foundation, 2005
2. Interview with the artist, April 28, 2005.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid
6. Jo Lauria Ruth Duckworth Modernist Sculptor p. 83., Lund Humphries in association with Art Options Foundation, 2005
7. Ibid. p. 76
8. Interview with the artist, April 28, 2005.
Untitled
(Mama Pot)
1975
Untitled (cup-and-blade works) 1997
Untitled Wall Sculpture 2002
Untitled sculpture 1999
