Ewen Henderson

Ewen Henderson (1934 -2000) was known for his highly original constructions - a mixture of clays and glazes variously coloured, ranging from monumental sculptures to dynamic teabowls each piece exemplifying a richly textured surface like no other. He rejected the wheel early on feeling it too restrictive instead preferring to hand built to best express his vision. He was also a dedicated painter - his watercolours, gouaches and collages very much part of his creative output.

Henderson came to ceramics comparatively late. After the RAF he became interested in painting and sculpture whilst working for a timber company in Cardiff, leaving Wales in 1964 to study art Goldsmith's College. It was there he discovered clay and went on to study Ceramics at the Camberwell School of Art under the well regarded tenure of Hans Coper and Lucie Rie. Graduating in 1968 he began teaching there himself not long after alongside building an international reputation as a truly individual potter.

Henderson described clay as ‘fluxed earth’ and saw pottery necessarily as a form of abstract sculpture whose material transformation and disintegration he sought to capture and celebrate. His works abound with richly textures and geological crusts characterised by green, blue and pinkish patinated surfaces. Henderson began by making vessel forms but, moving away from the received, traditional uses of pottery, he expanded and collapsed the everyday receptacle into a site of suspension. He once claimed: “My present work is obsessed with edges, points of change, endings. It explores the significance of what is broken, torn or cut […] it is a kind of drawing in three dimensions. I start with fragments – familiar, found, improvised – and then build up to complex structures.”

His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.