Bowl

This poised pinched porcelain vessel rises upwards from a narrow foot and its surface features a wash of delicate matt glazes. Made in 1960, this is an early work by Ruth Duckworth and it was during this period that she first begun to use porcelain alongside stoneware in her practice. Porcelain is a unique material for Duckworth and for her, ‘…there is no other material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength’. [1] Later porcelain works by Duckworth in the Sainsbury Centre Collection include 50638 and 50739.

Duckworth came to England in 1936 as an émigré. She initially studied stone carving and worked as a stone sculptor for nearly a decade. In the early 1950s, following the advice of Lucie Rie she studied ceramics at the Central School of Art and Design. She moved to Chicago in the mid-1960s and here she was commissioned for several large-scale ceramic murals that united her carving and ceramics practices.

Sim Panaser, August 2020

[1] Ruth Duckworth quoted in Tony Birks, ‘Modernist Impulses’, in Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor, Tony Birks and Jo Lauria (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), p. 46.