When the late Seamus Heaney stood on the podium of Stockholm Concert Hall to give his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995, the poet, playwright and translator read To a Dutch Potter in Ireland, a poem inspired by his friendship with the internationally acclaimed Dutch artist and craft maker Sonja Landweer.
“He called her vases and vessels Hosannas ex furnis, in one poetic phrase, placing her among the gods, turning her clay objects into hymns forged from fire, and went on to become one of her greatest admirers,” writes Catherine Marshall in the introduction to deVeres’ forthcoming sale The Studio Auction: Sonja Landweer and Barrie Cooke.
Landweer, who died in 2019, arrived in Ireland in the 1960s to teach ceramics as artist in residence at the newly founded Kilkenny Design Workshops, but she also painted, designed jewellery and worked in bronze and pottery. Her works form part of many public collections including the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, and the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden, both in the Netherlands; the Hildesheim Städtisches Museum in Germany; the Museum of Decorative Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark; and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Her ceramics have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Ireland since the 1960s, including retrospectives at Visual, Carlow, and the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny and Design Yard, Dublin.
Landweer was born in Amsterdam, the eldest child of an artist mother and teacher father who was killed by the Nazis while fighting the Dutch resistance to the second World War, when she was just 12. She established her own studio after studying at the Amsterdam School of Industrial Design, and worked as an apprentice to the Zaalberg Pottery Studios.
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Her superb technical skills, married with artistic talent, saw her push the boundaries of ceramics beyond the functional. Despite her young career, she was widely known in Europe as a member of the Amsterdam Six, and had a residency in the acclaimed Arabia Design Studios, Finland. Landweer also worked at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris, while she was also awarded the Verzetsprijs in the Netherlands (1964) and the Prix Artistique, Biennale Internationale de Céramique d’Art, Villauris, France, in 1974.
When she arrived in Ireland as part of an international group – which included German silversmith Rudolf Heltzel – to teach, and was exhibited at the David Hendriks Gallery, she fell in love not only with Ireland, but also with Irish-based English artist Barrie Cooke, who had settled here in the mid-1950s. They established themselves at Jerpoint in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, where they fostered a creative community and co-founded the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Her work has been described as a type of alchemy due to her knowledge of minerals and the natural world, and often led her to experiment with new glazes: “When she looked at the geology of Ireland and discovered that Irish clay was rich in copper and relatively low in iron – like the female body in pregnancy – it simply proved their appropriateness as the source of the glazes and patinations she gave to her organically shaped vessels,” Marshall writes in the catalogue notes.
She battled with illness from the early 1980s – as a result of an overactive thyroid and a heart attack – which Marshall suggests was a result of her “relentless and punishing work ethic”. She was forced to abandon the throwing of pots for almost 15 years, and while confined to bed, turned her attention towards “marginally less physically destructive work such as jewellery and printmaking or much smaller work that could be hand-built such as her highly polished seed pods, conkers and little abstracted bird-shaped vessels”.
Some of these form part of the sale, such as Seed (lot 45, €500-€700), and a bronze, Conker (lot 32, €3,000-€5,000).
When she was preparing for a return exhibition of the Six Amsterdam Potters, a visitor to the studio accidentally knocked over a shelf laden with her works waiting to be fired, she was persuaded to cast the forms in bronze instead of firing them, which meant allowing someone else to complete the work. She worked with Anne Campbell of Cast, the Dublin sculpture foundry, where she learned rather different chemical processes in the new medium.
The sale comprises 75 works by Landweer, as well as pieces she collected by Jan van der Vaart, David Leach, John ffrench and former husband, the late artist Barrie Cooke, whose Portrait of Sonja Landweer (lot 118, €10,000-€15,000) is included. Items from her studio, her potters seat (lot 82, €50-€100) and her kiln (lot 80, €200-€400), are featured, as is her potters’ wheel, which is immortalised in Heaney’s poem, at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (lot 81, €1,000-€2,000).
“And if glazes, as you say, bring down the sun, Your potter’s wheel is bringing up the earth.”
