Ruth Duckworth is one of the stars of Chicago’s art heritage. This diminutive, German-born artist is responsible for some of the greatest large-scale ceramic sculptures ever produced. She was educated in Great Britain where she made a name for herself as a ceramist. But it wasn’t until she came to Chicago and taught at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios that she matured into the sculptor that we now know. The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago has recently mounted a substantial exhibition of her work titled “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity” which focuses on the work she did while in Chicago.

 

 

        Some have written that Duckworth was subtly influenced by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. I see more of Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi in her work, especially the pieces that connote figuration. This is suggested by a tea set she created while in England. The set bears the same sleekly reduced forms that one sees in Brancusi’s Leda and Jean Arp’s Extremity of a Mythical Wineskin (both in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). To me, any similarity with Moore is tenuous. He is mostly concerned with the form of the human body, while Duckworth is more concerned with humanity’s relationship to its natural environment.

        There are a number of white porcelain works in this exhibition that also support the suggestion that Arp and Brancusi were an influence on Duckworth’s aesthetic—the 1996 white stoneware piece Spirit of Survival (Study) is one, and the porcelain Untitled from 1990 is another. Additional black colored examples also follow the smooth, distilled forms characteristic of these two artists.

 

        Duckworth’s motivations are showcased in a significant way at the University of Chicago campus—specifically the Henry Hinds Laboratory for the Geophysical Sciences, located at 5734 S. Ellis. The lobby of the building houses Duckworth’s Earth, Water, Sky, a ceramic mural installed in 1968 that covers all four walls and the ceiling of the space. Half a block north on the other side of the street—at the site of the first controlled nuclear reaction—is Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy from 1967. In this sculpture, Moore addresses the promises and dangers of human civilization; the piece looks both like a skull and a mushroom cloud. On the other hand, in Earth, Water, Sky, Duckworth takes a more holistic approach, concentrating on humanity’s understanding of the natural world, not just its potential destruction.

 

        Duckworth’s eight-piece porcelain wall mural from 2006 contains four spheres partially enveloped by a smooth, rounded membrane—an abstract suggestion of embryos. This arrangement makes one think of the hollowed out niches that one finds in some of Moore’s sculptures, most famously his Mother and Child in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Here, Duckworth and Moore share an affinity for the fecundity of the female role and the use of reduced forms to express it.

 

        Before going further into the exhibition, one must consider Duckworth’s Clouds Over Lake Michigan, newly installed in the Joseph Regenstein Library’s first floor reading room. The piece, dating from 1974, was originally commissioned by the Dresdner Bank to adorn their Chicago office. When the institution moved to a space that could no longer accommodate the enormous work, the University of Chicago was able to obtain it for their collection of public art. Nine feet tall and 23 feet wide, it was installed in the Walter Netsch-designed building. A sequel to Earth, Water, Sky, it has a more local focus with Chicago being depicted. This whole series of geological murals was inspired by Duckworth’s friendship with Tetsuya Fujita, the co-creator of the F-Scale to rate the intensity of tornados, who happened to be at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. From this friendship came Duckworth’s interests in geology and meteorology which influenced a great deal of her mural work.

 

        The exhibition opens with one of the wall pieces inspired by this friendship—Sky over Illinois, from 1985. It was originally commissioned for the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago. The scallop forms covering its surface are derived from aerial photographs of tornado paths, a motif that recurs in many of Duckworth’s murals. The other, much larger, wall work in the show—Untitled from 1969—was completed for a private collector couple. An 11-foot tall, vertical stoneware piece, it was inspired by the Maroon Bells Crater Lake trail in Colorado, near the vacation home of the commissioners. In this mural, we do not see tornado paths but, rather, the piling on of slabs to simulate elevation. This work is a little drab in that the only non-earth tone color is in the lake in its lower third. But the somber earth tones of the mural conceptually reflect the geology of the site on which it is based, rather than the verdant green forest that covers the area in summer. Duckworth has also taken liberty with the lake’s shape; the real one is more like a comma than a circle. Another wall piece in this category, Untitled (Wall Sculpture) from the 1970s, consists of three adjoining panels with three raised forms that vaguely resemble volcanos. They are rising out of a sea of dark blue-green glaze—the Hawaiian Islands?

 

        However, for this viewer, Duckworth’s most visually and aesthetically dramatic works are the wall pieces that are rendered in porcelain. These panels stretch the modeling capacity of porcelain to its limit. The first one of these in the show—Untitled from 1970—is one of the more modestly scaled porcelain wall pieces at 33 ¾ x 17 ½ x 5 ½ inches. In it, five white clouds are held aloft by thin, very pale olive ridges. One wonders how those clouds manage to stay suspended to cast shadows that suggest other forms. The ridges themselves suggest mountains, but they are as light as thin pencil marks on drawing paper.

 

        A work that is more earthly is the modest sculpture built for the Paul Schweikher House where Martyl and Alexander Langsdorf lived. Martyl was the artist responsible for the Doomsday Clock and Alexander was a Manhattan Project physicist from the University of Chicago who worked with Enrico Fermi. They purchased the house in 1956 and lived there until their deaths (Alexander in 1996 and Martyl in 2013). Martyl and Ruth were long-time friends, and Ruth created a piece for the house’s entryway niche. Only 45 x 15 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches, multiple layers of porcelain create an irregular channel down the middle of the piece. These slabs are covered with watery blue glazes interspersed with brown tones, mostly at the outside edges. A small, wooded creek runs along the edge of the property—a possible source of inspiration for this piece.

 

        For this viewer, the masterpiece is the nearly seven feet long, four-panel free-standing work, Untitled from circa 1978. It is mostly off-white with occasional areas of a pale earthy toned glaze. On one side, the piece reiterates the floating cloud-over-ridges motif of Untitled from 1970. On the other side, these flat porcelain segments are stretched and staggered to create a canyon with an “egg” bubble hovering in the background. It made me recall Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of the New Mexico landscape. This striking work is the full flowering of the suspended porcelain panel technique on a truly massive scale. The tornado tracks from Sky Over Illinois have evolved into canyon walls (or is it a birth canal to channel the egg in the background?). The work emphasizes Duckworth’s “mother earth” holistic aesthetic.

 

        Opposite this large sculpture is a glass cabinet containing seven small porcelain “vessels,” equally spectacular in their finesse. Especially noteworthy is Untitled from 1990, owned by the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The piece, with its pale, celadon green glaze, again has the “egg” resting in a cup-like form ready to be released through a slot cut in the front of the cup. The egg is surmounted by a hemisphere of white porcelain, suggesting a sunrise, the birth of a new day–a widely used symbol in American Indigenous cultures. Another piece, Untitled from 1973, owned by the Racine Art Museum, suggests other autochthonic beliefs of many Indigenous cultures. A hemisphere splits down its center to reveal sprouting forms ready to emerge from the earth and come into the light. Like the earlier piece, it has an organic, subtly green and textured surface, alluding to its earthly origin—reinforcing the reference to mother earth.

        Much of Duckworth’s work is subtly sexual and mostly from a female perspective of being a giver of new life–the “egg” or “seed” hemisphere appears in several of her wall murals. Two wall pieces, however, are more overt in their reference. Untitled from 1972 and Untitled from 1973 both distinctly suggest female genitalia. This is in keeping with the birthing undertones of the two cup pieces discussed earlier. Duckworth also enjoyed creating sleek, female “humanoid” forms. Not figures per se, they suggest people through the interrelationship of forms. My favorite is from 1987—the smoked stoneware Untitled piece from the estate of the artist. I call it “The Flying Nun” because of the whimsical hat I see on its head. Again, the figure is definitely female with a protruding hemisphere right at the abdomen. Within this exhibition, there is one exception to Duckworth’s feminine references. The bronze Untitled from 1991 is noticeably phallic in form and, from certain angles, suggests ejaculation.

 

        Finally, there are several stoneware pieces that reflect the “truth to materials” trend that dominated the ceramics art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. That line of thinking emphasized the raw nature of clay and its earthen source. Several Duckworth pieces in this exhibition fall into this category. Mama Pot (date unknown), a modest sized vessel at only 14 inches wide, is one. With a brown, almost burnt, surface with occasional rough incisions, it is irregularly-shaped and clearly slab built. It echoes the shapes and surfaces one often finds in Raku pottery from that period. Another, the somewhat larger Untitled (Mama Pot) from 1975, has a similarly rough construction. It is lighter in color on the outside, with blue and tan glazes lightening its mass. The inside, however, is dark and cavernous. And a subtly sexual slit in the side of the pot makes an appearance once again. These vessels parallel the wall pieces–such as the nearly five-foot wide triptych Untitled (Wall Sculpture) mentioned earlier—as both have a similarly rough, earthy finish.

 

        “I think of life as a unity. This includes mountains, mice, rocks, trees, women, and men. It’s all one big lump of clay.” Duckworth’s statement about this exhibition is amply demonstrated by the work included in this offering. But there is one aspect of her world view that is not fully addressed in her words, yet it is revealed in the reproductive undertones of many of the pieces. With that work, Duckworth reveals a world view more akin to some Indigenous people of America who have a “mother earth” spirituality, such as the Algonquians, for example. This world view had people emerging from the earth, not being created by a god, nor migrated from somewhere else. They view themselves as “of the earth”—descended from “mother earth.” This concept is also found in Southeast Asia and in Mycenaean Greek mythology as Gaia, where it dates as far back as the 13^th or 12^th century BC. Significantly, it is not compatible with the Judeo-Christian creation myth.

        Forced to leave Germany in 1936 for England due to growing Nazi antisemitism, Duckworth survived WW II (no small feat in England during that time) and emigrated to the United States in 1964 for professional reasons. It is no wonder that the Judeo-Christian creation myth did not stay with her as an aesthetic inspiration. At that time, the world was all about military conquest, death, and destruction. Having also survived WW II in northern France, I can sympathize with her change in philosophy to a creation that did not depend on a vengeful god, or megalomaniacal men. In doing so, she developed and demonstrated a world view that was life-giving and fully compatible with Mother Earth.

 

 

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.