Home and also somewhere else very far away: Lynda Draper

By Sonia Legge

Lynda Draper’s skeletal ceramic constructions evolve intuitively like 3D drawings. New to Sullivan+Strumpf, Lynda has over 35 years of focussed studio practice and is recognised as a ceramic artist who constantly pushes the technical limits and conventional aesthetics of the medium.

Lynda Draper Somnambulism, 2019 ceramic and various glazes. Installation view, Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, Shepparton Art Museum Photo credit: Lynda Draper

In 2018 Lynda Draper was offered a three-month residency in the former music pavilion of Madame Elisabeth, sister of King Louis XVI. This was an invitation to live and work in Versailles and to exhibit the body of work that evolved at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils in Paris.

It may come as no surprise that the sculptures created in this fairytale scenario conjure topiary, white marble, faces on urns, decorative ironwork and confectionery. Lynda wrote about this experience:

Unlike my home environment, this surreal, strangely familiar, haunting landscape prompted me to consider my European heritage and question the complex character of early European cultural settlement within the Australian natural landscape. It made me aware of how on a subconscious level my world view and art rituals, history, parables and legends. Tales of kings, queens, princes and princesses, dark forests and wintery Christmases so alien to the Australian environment.

However, far from being romantic, Draper’s sculptures tap into the broader human collective unconscious: universal mythologies linked to spirit images, masks, darkness and ghostlike forms. For, while her sculptures glisten and shimmer and, as she herself reflected, look as if they might be made from bubble gum or paper-mâché, Draper’s work is also decidedly of the earth. Clearly we see the marks her fingers made pushing into the clay, pinching and encouraging it to achieve its final form. And despite their vivid, ‘unnatural’ colours, nature is in the arcing forms alluding to motion: splashing waves, ascending bird song; or to stasis: bones, ice. Thoughts about the flesh are also present in the tactile fragility of the clay and the sensuality of the fresh paint.

Altogether Lynda Draper’s ceramic sculptures invite contemplation of some other realm. Paraphrasing the Australian surrealist artist James Gleeson, she sculpts what we know is there but we don't yet have the perception to see. She makes the intangible tangible.

Lynda Draper was born in Sydney in 1962. She studied arts education/ceramics at UNSW, then at the National Art School. Now recognised as one of Australia’s finest and most revolutionary art practitioners working in the field of ceramics, she is considered to be an inspirational teacher and is currently Head of Ceramics at National Art School. She was included in Phaidon’s landmark 2017 book Vitamin C - Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, a global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists.

“If she doesn’t have access to clay she will work from preliminary sketches, however, her most successful pieces evolve organically, often from a state of subconscious reverie.”

It would be fair to say that since graduating Lynda Draper has been drawn to the domestic uncanny.

The coastal farmhouse built in 1880 she and her partner moved to thirty years ago contained traces of generations of people’s lives through objects that remained in the house and sheds. Partly in response, Draper made a series of large floor installations consisting of tenderly wrought ceramic and wax objects inspired by the metal washing basins, buckets and hand-made funnels from her new/old bathhouse. Another series was based on kitchen utensils carefully fused together - objects with an individual/ collective dreamlike identity. Devoid of colour, these ceramic sculptures had the visual fragility of paper or wax but the resilience and permanence of fired clay.

Humans widely believe that inanimate objects have supernatural powers, and souvenirs (in the sense of objects collected on life’s journey), particularly their relationship to thoughts of lack and impermanence, have featured in Draper’s art practice. Home Altar, an earlier series of work, was based on childhood figurines rescued from her family home just prior to it being sold and demolished. Draper wrote:

From the impact my childhood objects had on me, I can understand how cultures have worshipped inanimate objects - particularly their power of embodying the spirits of the departed. These artifacts reemerged into my life as extraordinary: familiar yet strange; generating a peculiar conflation of past and present, memory and emotion, self and other; triggering an overwhelming nostalgia that crept into unease.

In the ‘portrait’ series, 2012-2013, she returned to earlier ways of working, reintroducing colour and pinching and coiling the works. With its instinctively positioned coloured blobs and short sticks, Annette 2013, was inspired by a real person, but came about from a subconscious doodle Draper made in response to a souvenir owned by her and so, through a kind of double-pike magical thinking, Draper created an embodiment and disembodiment of her subject.

Since then, forms in Draper’s work have moved closer towards those we recognise in her sculptures today. Totemic and ceremonial, the lovely fine lines in the attenuated arms in this work from her 2015 genie bottle series seem to herald her later cage/crown-like arabesqueing structures.

In 2019 Lynda Draper won Australia’s most prestigious ceramics prize, the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, with the multi-piece work Somnambulism. Acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, a piece from this series will be included in the upcoming exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now at the National Gallery of Australia, 14 November 2020 – 31 January 2021, and is to be featured in a major associated publication celebrating 150 Australian women artists.

Lynda Draper Spring, 2019 ceramic and various glazes 80 x 55 x 50 cm Collection Shepparton Art Museum Photo credit: Robin Hearfield

Lynda Draper uses many different glazes, lustres and enamels; hand-building, pinching and building up her work with coils, sometimes building complex works straight onto shelves that can be placed directly into the kiln, often firing works multiple times.

If she doesn’t have access to clay she will work from preliminary sketches, however, her most successful pieces evolve organically, often from a state of subconscious reverie.

I’m a huge advocate of daydreaming. I’m interested in the relationship between the mind and material world and the related phenomenon of the metaphysical. Creating art is a way of attempting to bridge the gap between these worlds and of mastering reality through fantasy.

Her most recent series partly evolved from her interest in pareidolia and the phenomenon of universal mythologies linked to the spirit image. The skeletal constructions evolve intuitively, they are I suppose 3D clay drawings. There is a freedom in working in clay this way, the forms grow and unfold. Often there is no intention that they will become anthropomorphic, the collaging of coloured ceramic pieces onto the skeletal constructions seems to give them life; sometimes they are read figuratively, sometimes not.

In a Hansel-and-Gretel type way, Lynda Draper’s ceramic sculptures are delicious. At once enchanting, light-filled, spun-sugar fantasies and dark, earthy folk tales, they are both intensely personal and collective; inevitable-seeming and surprising: clay bodies with soaring spirits.

Sonia Legg is a Sydney-based writer and valuer of art and archives.