Cover Image: Pippin Drysdale working on a ceramic vessel in her Fremantle studio. Photograph © Robert Frith – Acorn Photo.

Pippin Drysdale: Infinite Terrain 
Art Gallery of Western Australia

For great artists, medium and identity are often deeply interwoven; their work looks both outward and inward, documenting observations on the world at large as well as their inner life. Pippin Drysdale: Infinite Terrain at the Art Gallery of Western Australia is a comprehensive exhibition on the formative Western Australian ceramicist Pippin Drysdale and a testament to her nuanced studies of the natural world.

An experienced and accomplished ceramicist, Drysdale developed her oeuvre over forty-five years of practice. After graduating with an Advanced Diploma in Ceramics at Perth Technical College in 1981, she studied at the Anderson Ranch Arts Centre in the USA, followed by the Western Australian Institute of Technology in 1995. Travelling extensively, Drysdale took part in workshops, residencies and exhibitions across Australia, North America and Europe.

Curated by Isobel Wise, Infinite Terrain roughly organises Drysdale’s works by ‘series’, with each of these series representative of a stage of Drysdale’s artistic growth and exploration. Drysdale commands form and colour to render moments of contemplative reflection within natural environments. The exhibition is thus a chronology of the artist’s life, subtly and seamlessly taking the viewer on a journey across the diverse landscapes in Drysdale’s encounters.

The Logging on Parchment series (1989 – 92) in glazed porcelain, was one of Drysdale’s first depictions of the fragility of the Australian landscape. She was inspired to create these pieces after discovering an area of desolated forest in Manjimup while walking with a friend. Drysdale mimics, through her layered glazes and brushwork, the impact of negative space in the Manjimup forest. The painted trees on the plate are merely black twigs, with remnants of scenery worked into black nothingness.

From the mid 1990’s onwards, Drysdale’s artistic practice became travel intensive and experimentally focused, as she made her way through the Kimberley, the Central Desert, Tanami Desert and Pakistan in 1998. Her Tanami Mapping Series I-III (2008 – 14) was born from this period; a series of vases that invoke the shapes, layers and colours of the desert. Striped, red earth with a lustre of gold flecks communicate the emotional richness and complexity of the land, creating an object you feel as if you can walk into.

Drysdale’s latest series, East Kimberly series (2025) reflects on her visits to Northern Australia thirty years ago. This collection constitutes a full circle moment for Drysdale’s craft, including vases as well as abstracted “bungle bungles” and “ant mound” ceramic domes to complete the habitat. The colours and the shapes in this series are a coalescence of Drysdale’s style evolution and the bright colours and layered organic shapes are evocative of Australia’s unique hinterlands.

Infinite Terrain is a retrospective, present and prescient exhibition, a profound mixture of thought, form and hue, which documents the artwork and observations of Drysdale’s lifetime, and looks forward to those to come. It is rare to experience such a complete visual story that is so significant to Western Australian contemporary art. Come to this ceramic odyssey and be swept away.