Elizabeth Fritsch: Otherworldly Vessels

With many objects drawn from Fritsch’s private collection, this first retrospective of the ceramicist in 15 years presents a rare opportunity to see her works

A group of hand-built ceramic vessels with coloured slips by Elizabeth Fritsch. © The Artist. Image courtesy Adrian Sassoon, London. Photo: Sylvain Deleu.

The Hepworth Wakefield
8 March 2025 – spring 2026

by BETH WILLIAMSON

When Elizabeth Fritsch (b1940) was studying harp at Birmingham School of Music, then piano at the Royal Academy of Music, she could not have imagined what direction her career would soon take. After teaching herself to hand-build pots in the mid-1960s, she enrolled at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 1968. Fritsch may have studied under the tutelage of Eduardo Paolozzi and Hans Coper, but when she graduated in 1971, she had developed a unique ceramic practice. This is perhaps not surprising, associated as she was with the “New Ceramics” group of female RCA graduates challenging established functional or utilitarian ideas of the vessel. Along with Alison Britton, Jill Crowley, Carol McNicoll and Jacqueline Poncelet, Fritsch’s use of lively colours and expressive forms prompted a shift in British studio pottery, moving practice into a more sculptural and expressive space. The 100 or so works made by the artist since the 1970s are brought together in this exhibition in a manner that focuses attention on the vessels’ sculptural forms and the painterly techniques used on their surfaces. The other point worth noting is that the objects in this exhibition are mainly drawn from Fritsch’s private and rarely seen collection, as well as important loans from private and public collections.

A group of hand-built ceramic vessels with coloured slips by Elizabeth Fritsch. © The Artist. Image courtesy Adrian Sassoon, London. Photo: Sylvain Deleu.

The musicality of these vessels is evident from the beginning, as precise placing allows careful composition of groups of vessels that highlights the spaces and dialogues between forms. Fritsch explains: “The spaces between pots assembled in groups is, to me, more lovely and musical than any of the spatial relationships which may be incorporated into an individual piece. These groups are, I suppose, like movements in classical music – in which the arrangement adds up, hopefully, to more than the sum of its parts … enabling a dance and play in space.” The connections that Fritsch makes between music and ceramics exceeds her classical training and spills over in the fullness of possibility in jazz, something she became interested in as she was developing her ceramic practice. As a counterpoint to the ideas of play and movement mentioned earlier, these group can sometimes be thought of as still life, something more usually considered in terms of painting.

Elizabeth Fritsch, Green Horn Vase, Collision of Particles (2008). Hand-built stoneware with coloured slips. Collection of the artist. © The Artist. Image courtesy Adrian Sassoon, London. Photo: Sylvain Deleu.

Her exploration of form and pattern on her pots connects to the rhythm and improvisation of jazz. Describing her understanding of improvisation, Fritsch explained it as “a rigorous approach to technical practice (in music and ceramics) not as an end in itself but as a means of achieving a kind of fluency and the freedom to act spontaneously … It is improvisation that results in each pot being unique and unrepeatable.” It is the patterns themselves that she sees as analogues to rhythm and perhaps that is why they are so important to her: “I like to use precisely articulated geometrical patterns and contrive optical games, without, I hope, losing the feeling as it were of improvising on a given form, which is the blank pot.” In 1978, a solo exhibition in Leeds was called Pots about Music and Fritsch observed that music had become the landscape in which she worked, and we can see this sustained interest in music here in her Jazz Pots of the 1970s and 1980s.

Fritsch’s interest goes beyond music too. Among the otherworldly vessels, we can see here connections to funerary rituals, architecture and other fields of enquiry. She explores ziggurats and towers in every form and from every period, an architectural inquiry that sustains intellectual interest while supporting a gentle and playful aesthetic. Structures are stepped, leaning and as if in reverse formation. Tiny bases support seemingly teetering top-heavy vessels and there is a careful inquiry into balance and equilibrium. Here we are reminded of Fritsch’s observation: “The pot is not functional although it is a real container, being fully vitrified and watertight … the pot’s function is poetic and metaphoric, fictional.” The imaginary architecture of works such as Stepped Vessel (c1998), Reversible Ziggurat (1999) and Embarkation Tower (1998) needs little elaboration from me. These are the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia reimagined by Fritsch for the 20th century and historic embarkation towers remodelled for contemporary times.

Elizabeth Fritsch, Mother and Child (Collision of Particles), 1990. Hand-built stoneware with coloured slips. Collection of the artist. © The Artist. Image courtesy Adrian Sassoon, London. Photo: Sylvain Deleu.

Something I haven’t yet touched on is the manner in which Fritsch’s work hovers in a space between two and three dimensions of painting and sculpture (what she refers to as two and a half dimensions) as well as between “order and chaos, heaviness and lightness, stillness and movement and between the ‘real’ and the ‘otherworldly’”. The perpetual state of equilibrium that the artist works with and that exists within individual vessels, is also evident in groups of vessels too. One relationship that particularly caught my attention in this show was a familial one between mother and child. Mother and Child, Collision of Particles Vase, Mother (1990) is a fulsome and steady form. The accompanying Mother and Child, Collision of Particles Vase, Child (1990) is stepped, off-kilter and leaning inwards towards the mother as if seeking reassurance.

Elizabeth Fritsch, Vases from Tlön, 1984. Hand-built stoneware with coloured slips. Collection of the artist. © The Artist. Image courtesy Adrian Sassoon, London. Photo: Sylvain Deleu.

In earlier work such as Vase, Giant Steps (1979) and Piano Pot, Pianissimo (1976), the front of the vessels is rounded, abundant and patterned while the rear is flattened and devoid of pattern. This formation makes these pots more akin to painting than anything else, something that is underlined in this exhibition with the presence of Ben Nicholson’s 1954 painting Delos in which the flatness of the image and the balance of the colour palette align well with Fritsch’s vessels displayed close by. Their frontal fullness is flattened by their patterning, too, so they pull back from three dimensions, always resisting their condition as pots while still existing as vessels for the imagination. It is perhaps this constant pull between two and three dimensions, between movement and stillness, between painting and sculpture, that lends these vessels their unique fascination. As the first retrospective of Fritsch’s work in 15 years, it is essential viewing.