Untitled

Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009)

1972

Stonewave wall panel on plexi

Located in the third floor atrium of Gordon Center for Integrative Science, 929 E. 57th Street

Donated by Carolyn Sachs in memory of husband Robert G Sachs

Eighteen stoneware cylinders rest on a backdrop of gray plexiglass in Ruth Duckworth’s untitled 1972 sculpture. Duckworth formed the vertical semi-cylinders from slabs of clay and marked them with deep, striated grooves. She then deformed each cylinder by pushing, compressing, and twisting. Duckworth left most of the stoneware unglazed, save for sporadic patches of earthy gray, brown, and black. She also included small stones and coarse sand in the clay, making the stoneware dry and rough and emphasizing her medium’s natural origin.

Clay is earth, the result of ceaseless grinding of rocks, strong winds, and the force of water. It can then be molded, formed, and hardened into ceramic at temperatures hot enough to melt glass. Unlike paint or graphite that lose their obvious connection to natural sources after processing, the medium of stoneware is necessarily recalls nature. By adding in sand and other inclusions, Duckworth made the clay brittle and inelastic. Through its medium, Untitled (1972) addresses the relationship between humanity and the plasticity of earth. Her treatment of clay left jagged edges and tears reminiscent of violent fractures in the Earth’s crust as one might see on the coasts of Scotland or in the mountains of Nepal.

Ruth Duckworth explored the environmental condition of our planet. In a biographical documentary, Duckworth said, “My garden, my environmental magazines, using my eyes as I travel round the world…it’s nature basically. Nature is very sexy; we didn’t invent that.” She closely inspected the world and traveled frequently, finding the peculiarities of nature dramatic and worthy of investigation. She rarely repeated forms, preferring to iterate and experiment. A tiny seed-pod from her garden was one of her favorite forms, from which she made many pieces. She was also fascinated with the grandeur of earth as seen from space. For the large project Earth Water Sky (1964), in the entrance to the Hinds Laboratory at UChicago, she studied some of the first published images of the earth as seen from the Mariner 9 satellite during its voyage to orbit around Mars.

Accompanying Duckworth’s awe for nature was her concern for human exploitation of the earth. During her working years, the environmental movement raised awareness of the earth’s fragile ecosystems. In 1962 scientist Charles David Keeling identified rising CO2 concentrations. The first Earth Day was held in 1970 and the first United Nations environmental conference was held in 1972. At the same time, new photos of earth from space showed its green-blue, watery surface as a beautiful ball. Just as we began to understand the artistic and scientific grandeur of Earth, and perhaps as a result, we discovered the harm caused by our exploitation of its resources. Duckworth felt this duality deeply and expressed it in her work.

Her reverence for our world was only eclipsed by her concern for our future. In an interview for the 1994 edition of Art Journal, Duckworth said that which “is truly important is the survival of the planet. These ecological issues feel very large for me.” She explained that later in life she believed her work was of decreasing value in comparison to the vital efforts required to prevent the impending demise of our planet. Her work, in essence, became a form of human self-centeredness in the face of nature’s grandeur.

This tension between the human and the natural is acute in Untitled (1972). The stoneware cylinders look ancient like petrified roots or bones, contrasting dramatically with the modern, clean plexiglass backing. Plexiglass is a modern material and decidedly non-organic. Its synthetic character clashes with the organic material and form of the stoneware. The broken edges of the cylinders make this dialog between natural and artificial violent and argumentative. The cylinders seem to be broken parts of an ancient whole.

Duckworth’s method mimicked the organic world from which she drew inspiration. She strove to remove rational, logical thought while sculpting in favor of instinct and spontaneity. Duckworth said, “When I am working, I try not to think, I may have feelings, I may have something going on, I mean I am bound to have something going on, but I don’t want to think, I want it to happen by itself, I want it to flow up by itself and not interfere with it. When I have a break, I start thinking, you know, I wonder what I’ve got there.” In Untitled (1972), Duckworth did not make decisions according to prior reasoning, she made forms with uninterrupted action. This 1972 piece is likely a collage of elements, each an individual study in the organic. In short, for Duckworth, Untitled (1972) was an assemblage of processes.

As viewers, we benefit from understanding this spontaneous, non-rational philosophy. Untitled (1972) can be considered from an ecological perspective, but a subjective experience is just as enriching. Duckworth herself wanted to avoid imposing the curator or historicist’s interpretation: it is important when viewing works like Untitled, in Duckworth’s words, to “not sit on yourself, and watch everything…let things come up.”

Written by Innis Gallagher, Student in the College

Artist profile

Ruth Duckworth

(German, 1919-2009)

Biography

Ruth Duckworth began her long and idiosyncratic career as a sculptor at Liverpool College of Art in 1936 at the age of 17, after being forced to flee her native Germany as Hitler gained power. This was the beginning of a circuitous route as a professional artist, which would ultimately enable her to become one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and boundary–crossing sculptors. Eventually she would make her name as a master ceramicist, however, she would continue to use clay sculpturally, resisting the division between art and craft.

At the height of the war, she moved to Manchester and made her living performing puppet shows and carving puppet heads. After two years she briefly stopped carving and joined the war effort by working at two munitions factories in Manchester. At the end of World War II she moved to London, attended Kennington School of Art for a year to learn stone carving, and then worked carving stone for almost a decade. In the 1950s she started experimenting with simple clay sculptures and, at the recommendation of Lucie Rie, she decided to attend the prestigious Central School of Arts and Crafts to learn ceramics. Inspired by the abstract simplified forms of Cycladic sculpture at the British Museum and Henry Moore’s sculptures of fluid, semi–abstracted human bodies, she used clay sculpturally, creating unconventional and organic vessels and forms. By 1964 she had earned a reputation as a ceramicist in London and held several exhibitions at Primavera, a fine arts and craft gallery.

It was at this time that the University of Chicago called and offered Duckworth a one–year teaching position at Midway Studios. At the age of 46, Duckworth moved across the Atlantic to begin the most noteworthy chapter in her career. At her first show in the US with the Renaissance Society in January 1965, Julian Goldsmith, Chairman of the Geophysical Sciences Department, purchased one of her pieces, and almost immediately afterward she secured the commission for the ceramic mural, Earth, Water, Sky. The scale and duration of the project would ultimately convince her to stay in Chicago. Her early training in wood and stone sculpture and disinterest in conventional uses of clay propelled her down a path that threw into question the division between art and craft. Even after leaving the university in the 1970s, she worked out of her studio in Lakeview and continued to produce works that ranged from monumental sculpture to delicate vessels until her death in 2009 at the age of 90. From her large murals like Earth, Water, Sky (1969) to her small wall reliefs such as Untitled (1972) at the Smart Museum of Art, she demonstrated that not only is clay a viable medium for sculpture, but also that art and craft are not necessarily separate categories.

Written by Tessa Handa, a doctoral student in Art History