Alison Britton on Gillian Lowndes

It's a long, long working life, Gillian's life. She began to work in the 1950s, didn't she? And [she] has made so many different kinds of work. It's a fantastic progress through different sorts of form. By this time she's definitely making sculpture, isn't she? It's a small, decayed-looking, intriguing, bound together object. It's almost like a stack of tiles that have been woven together. [video clip starts] It might be fired tiles, I think, just fired too high so they've just started to melt and bubble. And a bit of brick and something very ordinary, an ordinary earthenware cup that's been fired much higher than it was meant to ... and with a different surface. It looks all moon landscape, doesn't it? As if it's suffered and endured.It's avery intriguing object. She's a really interesting artist, I think, always combining other materials, now ... wire, and this is a kind of metal band that's been fired in. It's stunning; it's an outlandish, beautiful thing.[video clip ends]

MP: Do you know her?

AB: I know her slightly, yes, though not as well as lots of other people. I've never taught with her. She was part of a team at both the Central and Camberwell, and then her husband, Ian Auld, was the Head of Camberwell. I've had to write about her at least once, I think, so I've interviewed her and I've talked about the work on several occasions. She just goes on being surprising. You never know what she's going to do next. I think she's been very influential on students, not that their work looked like hers, but in opening up the boundaries of seeing what happens when you fire something twice as high as it has ever been taken before. Very experimental, but it's not idle experiment, it's always with a very strong voice ... clear purpose.

MP:  It's strange because there's a cup, and the piece on the left almost looks like a piece of cake, the way she's painted it.

AB: Yes, yes.

MP: And then it looks like pieces of toast or ...

AB: And this is almost like quartz, isn't it?

MP: Yes

AB: Yes, toast is the first thought, isn't it?

MP: It's unusual in the group of pots that we've been looking at in that it incorporates other materials.

AB: Yes and it's also unusual in that it's not going to contain anything. I mean, there's an echo here of containing something, but even the bull was full of air, wasn't it? So it's a very important strand that she opened up.