Jane Hamlyn and saltglaze have become almost synonyms. Her development
as a ceramic artist and her technical achievements are most impressive.
She has introduced colour into saltglazed pots, the whole range
of the prisma but with an emphasis on the greens and the blues whose
breathtaking beauty is matched by a huge variety of shapes, textures,
designs, and sculptural applications like handles, buttons, knobs
and the like. These aesthetic qualities have not changed. But where
in the past Hamlyn's pots have been almost exclusively functional
and inspired by "the fermenting creative world of the kitchen",
as she herself put it, her most recent works break fresh ground.
Beside the more domestic ware there are now pots which, for example,
are meant to be seen in groups and are less solidly founded within
the categories of the useful. Nobody would, however, mistake these
new objects for work by somebody else but Jane Hamlyn. They are
things of beauty with all the vitality and freshness which we have
learned to associate with Hamlyn's art. There is opportunity to
see them at the Gallery Marianne Heller, for the time being housed
by the Kurpfälzisches Museum Heidelberg.
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