Gillian LOWNDES

View in collection She was born in Cheshire but spent part of her childhood in India and trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (1957-1979). She spent a year in Paris (1960) and two years in Nigeria (1971-1972) with her husband, the ceramic artist and specialist in African art, Ian Auld. She shared a studio in Bloomsbury and had a solo exhibition in 1961 in Primavera, the gallery owned by Henry Rothschild. From 1975 until the early 1990s, she taught part-time at Camberwell and Central St. Martins. Her work had always challenged vessel form, but in the mid 1970s she began to develop her mixed media sculpture which incorporates found materials including substances as varied as wire, cutlery, and loofahs. These were fired along with the clay and became incorporated into the work. The resultant sculptures are intriguing pieces that trail messages of their former constituents but create entirely new objects hanging out from the wall or extending into space like strange skeletal creatures.  She moved to Spitaflields in 2000 after the death of her husband and restored an 18th centruy house, using fragments of the debris in her ceramic work. Her work is represented in many collections in Britain and she had major shows at the Crafts Council (1987) and Contemporary Applied Arts (1994) and major exhibitions such as The Raw and the Cooked (1993-1994).

Details

• Dates: (1936-2010)