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| Gail Nichols |
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The work of American born Gail Nichols, now of Marrickville, Sydney has, for many years, referred to landscape. This is not a direct literal reference, nor an attempt to depict or mimic landscape. Rather it is an unconscious drawing together of elements from the experiences of landscape. Early pieces reflect the iconic desert landscape of Central Australia. They have wonderful rich orange slips, layered and spattered, with sgraffito lines like the markings of a lizard's tail in the sand, or dots like a pair of eyes of some unknown creature observing from a safe distance: the "two eyes" look. "If you put two dots together they draw your attention more than one dot or three - I guess we involuntarily recognise them as a pair of eyes." says Dr. Nichols.
Early in her ceramic career she was drawn to salt-glaze firing. She liked the way a changeable surface was produced within the kiln itself by the action of the salt on the clay, and the warm colours of the flashing. Nichols responds to a challenge and she found her challenge was 'how to achieve a satisfying surface, with the nuance and complexity of glaze, without using glaze?' She felt that glazing was a separate process that intervened between herself and the clay. To achieve the affects she wanted she needed to find a clay that could respond to salt-glazing without a covering layer of slips. Her PhD was the result of her experimentation with clay consistency, working toward formulating a clay that would respond the way that the slips did. As Nichols' experimentation continued she found she could derive a whole range of colours and effects through the interaction of soda with the clay and by manipulating the atmosphere in the kiln. It was through this research that she discovered she could produce a luscious blue-white ice glaze.
Surfaces pitted where air has escaped from molten stone; where the blue-white of ice exists side by side with the hot orange of the desert reflects both the icy winter landscape of her home state of Michigan, USA and her adopted home in Australia. These are Gail Nichols' personal landscapes. Within her work Nichols has found a spaciousness, and expansiveness where the eye travels from point to point across the piece, returning to some particularly salubrious conjunction of colour, surface and form. In her process as an artist, she has moved from the observed to the felt and from a means of decorating a form to a form arising out of a surface. In the marriage of surface and form, one completes the other. What is remarkable about her pieces is their lack of selfconsciousness. Each piece has a presence. They simply are.
Reference:
The Artist as Landscape: Weiss, Karen: Ceramics: Art and Perceptions No. 55, 2004.
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