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Review: Pleased to Meet You

Pleased to Meet You: Introductions by
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott
Nov. 3, 2012 to Mar. 24, 2013
UBC Museum of Anthropology. Co-curated
by Carol E. Mayer, Curator, MOA and Susan
Jeffries, Toronto-based independent curator.
Exhibition Design: Skooker Broome, MOA.
Responding to challenges to their authority
as keepers of history and collective memory,
museums have recently opened themselves to
interventions by artists, who bring a range of
critical, social and aesthetic concerns into their
once-sacrosanct halls. Asa result, museums and
museum practices have changed profoundly.
Many “interventions” take the form of political
critique, while others celebrate the diversity
and sheer abundance of things organized and
housed within museum collections. Gwyn
Hanssen Pigott’s exhibition at the Museum
of Anthropology (MOA) assumes this latter
form. Working closely with the curators
and staff, Pigott selected and organized 120
objects into eighteen groupings, which she
subsequently augmented with work created
specifically for this exhibition. The results are
dramatic and fascinating to observe; offering
insight into the mind and sensibility of one of

By Amy Gogarty

!

‘a

Yellow cluster, 2012, by Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Australia. Photo: Brian Hand.

the world’s great artists.

Pigott’s career is international in scope,
and her work is included in major collections
around the world. Born in Australia in 1935,
she first apprenticed with Ivan McMeekin and
later travelled to England, where she worked
with Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew and

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others while befriending Lucie Rie and Hans
Coper. She established studios in London and
France prior to returning to Australia in 1973.
Since the 1980s, she has grouped her work into
installations, which she calls “parades,” “trails”
or “clusters,” amalgamations that emphasize
line, mass and relationships between forms.
In 2007, she worked with the Freer Gallery
in Washington, DC, organizing objects from
its collection on the basis of colour, shape and
texture rather than historical context. It was
this exhibition that inspired curator Susan
Jeffries to work to bring Pigott to Vancouver
and the MOA collection.

Most of us arrange objects of personal
significance within our homes, filling shelves
and table tops with pots, natural specimens
and man-made things, yet few of us have the
opportunity to arrange the sorts of venerate
objects one finds in an ethnographic museum.
‘The objects in their impressiveness alone call
for a closer look--removed from dry historical
categories, they breathe and perform on a
larger stage. However, their very impressiveness
presents the artist with a challenge. Even
without labels, knowledgeable viewers are
drawn to identify components according to
culture, era or technology, countering Pigott’s
stated desire to “release the objects from these
organizing principles to enable individual
appreciation.” For those who cannot resist,
the exhibition brochure helpfully lists the
contents of each case,

Continued on Page 5

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter : December 2012

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