Tabletop temptations
The handworks of Edith Heath offer a feast for the eyes at the Pasadena Museum of California Art
By Joanna Beresford 07/02/2009
Heath Ceramics are to the hands what a golden scoop of French vanilla ice cream is to the tongue on a hot summer afternoon, when you’re overwhelmed with the urge for something sweet, cold and creamy. You can hardly keep your fingers off them. My advice to personnel at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Sept. 20 (that is, throughout the duration of the Edith Heath Ceramics exhibition): shackle everyone who passes through your doors and into the main gallery; bind them at the wrists or they will never resist the call of the clay and the glaze.
But the exhibitors have great respect for their guests. They rely on unshackled visitors’ integrity, self-control and adherence to protocol by displaying ceramics on open tables, where the pieces bask in the cool neutrality of gallery air. And beckon to passers-by with their smooth contours and rich colors.
The Edith Heath: Tabletop Modernist exhibit focuses on the life of ceramicist Edith Heath and her lasting influence on California design through pottery, according to PMCA literature. An Iowa farm girl, raised during the Depression and trained as a teacher, Heath worked as a studio potter in San Francisco until 1947, when a growing demand for her pieces inspired her to establish her own line of products, called Heath Ceramics.
She was influenced by the art and architecture of the Bauhaus movement, pursuing simple, functional forms, and she collaborated with many of the leading architects and designers of the mid-century modern genre, providing objects that a home can hardly survive without: cups and saucers, plates, bowls, pitchers, casseroles, even lighters and ashtrays. The PMCA exhibit includes drawer pulls, toggles and knobs and gleaming examples of her tile work.
Heath’s palettes and silhouettes appear deceptively minimalist and uniform. She even created some controversy among her colleagues when she embraced the concept of machine-assisted mass production of her work. Good design doesn’t depend on whether an object is made by hand, she asserted.
But her work was a constantly evolving and multifaceted enterprise. She was an innovator in the use of materials, always in search of more serviceable and attractive clays and glazes. As the current exhibit describes her, Heath, along with her husband, Brian, was chemist, engineer, form-giver, factory owner and ambassador of post-war living. She was a leader of the California pottery movement and she also looked magnificent among her plates. Even in seemingly candid photographs of her, wrapped in an apron, up to her elbows in clay and bent over a work table, Edith Heath looks more like Coco Chanel than your average pot thrower or cement mixer — or farmer’s daughter, who grew up baking bread and tending to her six siblings.
Edith and Brian Heath had no children. But they had many friends, loads of pottery wheels, kilns, stacks of mugs and bowls and walls covered with shimmering handcrafted tiles. Edith died in 2006, aged 94, but her studio and pottery line still exist. In 2003, husband-and-wife team Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey, both ceramic artists themselves, purchased Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, where every product is still made. They employ more than 40 craftspeople and utilize many of the methods and materials introduced by Edith Heath decades ago.
A revival of interest in the Arts and Crafts movement has led to continued interest in Heath Ceramics, which embodies the aesthetic of intimate, hand-hewn and useful works of art. Heath Los Angeles Studio and Store opened recently. Potter and studio director Adam Silverman, in collaboration with Heath Ceramics, has created a place where the designer-maker tradition flourishes. The outlet offers Heathware housewares and accessories, as well as custom and small-run works produced by Silverman himself. Some of the latter are included in the current exhibit; they offer a form/function dialogue with the traditional Heathware that’s as subtle and provocative as the original pieces themselves.
You can also view Edith Heath’s tile work at the Norton Simon Museum, where her exteriors earned the first AIA Gold Medal Award given to a non-architect. You may actually get your hands on the Norton Simon tiles, and you can swoosh your fingers along pottery at the studios in Los Angeles or Sausalito. But feel with your eyes only at the PMCA retrospective.
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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