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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 signif icant 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 an end to her working life. Whilst the exhibition is not envisioned as a chronological retelling, it opens with Fritsch ’s early efforts to f ind her artistic rhy thm. 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 f irst UK solo exhibition, held at the Crafts Council at Waterloo Place in 1974. The exhibition took place just three years af ter 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 litt le 70 March/April 2025
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leu De in lva Sy tos by ; pho ld Wakefie Hepworth of the mysterious and ref lects 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 f inally at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. That exhibition and its representation here i l luminate Fritsch ’s life-long interest in music. Herself a trained musician in the harp and piano, she has been continually inf luenced 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 inf luential to Fritsch. For example, a large Ben Nicholson painting demonstrates her keen attention to his use of colour and overlapping geometric patterns. 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 f iring, herself a master at single-f ired works, Coper was, however, the Images: courtesy defining inf luence 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 f irst pots were coiled at her kitchen table and f ired 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 i l lustrated timeline shows chronologically personal milestones and contextual events, giving wider insight into Fritsch ’s ar t ist ic orbit. Otherworldly Vessels, Hepworth Wakefield, 8 March – spring 2026; hepworthwakefield.org March/April 2025

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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 signif icant 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 an end to her working life.

Whilst the exhibition is not envisioned as a chronological retelling, it opens with Fritsch ’s early efforts to f ind her artistic rhy thm. 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 f irst UK solo exhibition, held at the Crafts Council at Waterloo Place in 1974. The exhibition took place just three years af ter 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 litt le

70 March/April 2025

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