Sold at Auction: Gwyn Hanssen Pigott

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM (1935–2013) was an Australian ceramic artist. She was recognized as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. By the time she died she was regarded as "one of the world's greatest contemporary potters". She worked in Australia, England, Europe, the USA, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, influences from her apprenticeships to English potters were still apparent in her later work. But in the 1980s she turned away from production pottery to making porcelain still-life groups largely influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott was born Gwynion Lawrie John on 1 January 1935 in Ballarat, Australia. She was the second of four daughters. Her father was director of an engineering firm and her mother an eclectic arts and crafts teacher–practitioner who surrounded her children with craft objects she had made.

In 1954, she received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne. Hanssen Pigott’s first introduction to ceramics was in the 1950s while a university student, taken with the Kent Collection of Chinese and Korean wares at the National Gallery of Victoria. Excited by Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book, she researched pottery in Australia for her honours thesis. She discovered and was enthralled by Ivan McMeekin, who had been apprenticed to both Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew in England. She abandoned her honours year and started an apprenticeship with McMeekin.