Geoffrey Swindell - Solo Exhibition April 2013

GEOFFREY Oxford SWINDELL Ceramics Gallery

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Geoffrey Swindell’s work is amongst the most recognisable in British ceramics.

One of its great miniaturists, his small concentrated landscapes are full of imaginative incident and detail, and extraordinary in their decorative density. ey have their own kind of narrative, one with its origin in a childhood microcosm fascinated by the miniature, from the toys that surrounded him to his early love of model kits. He eventually progressed to painting his own personal mythology of landscapes and buildings, a preoccupation that led him to art college in his home city of Stoke-on-Trent.

It was while studying art that he discovered ceramics, more particularly the highly refined work of pooers like Lucie Rie and Ruth Duckworth. It was a conversion to clay that subsequently took Swindell to further studies at the Royal College of Art. .e porcelain of Duckworth and others had an organic quality, fragile and almost unearthly. It coalesced with Swindell’s aaraction to the comparable qualities of form and surface in the seashells he was beginning to collect. His first small pieces began to emerge, and Swindell became part of an important new porcelain aesthetic in the late 60s and early 70s. A persuasive alternative to the more familiar world of stoneware casseroles and bread crocks, which Swindell wanted to move beyond, other alte leading exemplars included Peter Simpson, Deirdre Burnee, Mary Rogers and Ursula Morley Price. However Swindell’s work was quite distinct. His terms of reference broadened out to other more fantastic worlds, and from then on his pieces seemed as consciously urban as anything you might find on a beach or sea bed. It has a complexity of source material and structure. .e work is precision-engineered, yet such exactitude, such high definition throwing and turning (his pots resemble more the product of the lathe than the wheel) is offset by movements of colour and glaze surface. ere is a chromatic freedom within su this control that gives these diminutive sculptures a jewel-like iridescence. Here are the crystalline hues and textures of some exotic shell or coral, but also the seductive coloration and forms of childhood objects, of sci-fi imagery, of strange alien places. .ese vessels, ooen encrusted with various structures, may have some semblance of function. ere are decorative spouts, handle loops, elaborated lids and stoppers, while his vases and bowls even have a hint of Chinese Song about them.

Swindell has shown that ceramics can move into a more private realm, and to a great extent it is one born of his own very pri personal experience. When the critic Philip Rawson talked about ‘ceramics as treasure’ he was thinking in part about objects to be admired rather than touched. But this is a kind of found treasure to be picked up too, as one might pick up a luminous richly paaerned mollusc or crystal. Geoffrey Swindell’s inimitable highly craaed art has this intimacy; a sense of the hidden revealed.

David Whiting / March 2013

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GEOFFREY SWINDELL Solo Exhibitions 1972 British Craa Centre. London 1974 Oxford Gallery, Oxford 1974 Midland Group Gallery, Nooingham 1974 Suuon College, Surrey 1978 National Museum of Wales, Cardiff Gallery, Oxford 1979 Oxford Galle 1980 James Graham & Sons Gallery, New York 1985 James Graham & Sons Gallery, New York 1988 Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales 1997 European Ceramics, Yorkshire 1999 James Graham & Sons Gallery, New York 2002 Newport Museum & Art Gallery. Newport. S.Wales 2003 James Graham & Sons. New York 2006 James Graham & Sons. New York 2013 Oxford Ceramics Gallery, Oxford

Public Collections Victoria and Albert Museum, London Museum and Art Gallery’s in: Leicester, Swindon Reading, Birmingham, Bradford, Newport, Portsmouth, Stoke-on-Trent Nooingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Holburne Museum, Bath Royal Ulster Museum, Belfast Royal Scooish Museum & Edinburgh Castle Museum Abbot Hall, Museum, Kendal National Museum of Wales, Cardiff Abingdon Museum, Oxfordshire University College of Wales Aberystwyth Welsh Arts Council Abe Craas Council, London Yorkshire Education Authority Gallery Oldham, Manchester.

Boyman-van Beunigen, Rooerdam Art and History Museum, Brussels Princessenhof Museum, Leeuwarden, Holland Museum of Applied Arts, Sydney, Australia A National Gallery of Victoria, Australia Perth Museum, Australia Museum for Applied Art, Cologne, Germany Museum of Hanover, Germany Keramion Ceramics Museum, Germany National Museum for Ceramics, Valencia, Spain Landes Museum of Decorative Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland A Bellerive Museum, Switzerland

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Published by Oxford Ceramics Ltd. ©Oxford Ceramics Ltd. 2013 Oxford Ceramics Gallery 29 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX26AA tel: (+44) 01865 512320 Introduction ©David Whiting 2013 Photog Photography ©Michael Harris Photography ©Geoffrey Swindell Design: Michael Harris

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