single line single line heavy stacked stacked heavy Contents 4 Acknowledgements 9 Preface | Kelvin Browne 10 Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature | Rachel Gotlieb 24 Steven Heinemann in Context | Janet Koplos 33 Catalogue of Works 34 early work 38 negatives and pods 44 constructed forms and disks 50 bowls 64 closed forms 68 altered and extended forms 74 recent work 84 In Conversation | Kelvin Browne and Steven Heinemann 90 Photo Credits and Copyright Left: Has Bean, 2017 (detail, cat. 68) Acknowledgements I have had the good fortune of growing up with amazing The Gardiner Museum is grateful to Steven Heinemann for parents, Andrew and Eva Heinemann; truly a tough act to follow. sharing his creative genius and artistic process with the public To them and my remarkable partner and fellow artist Chung-Im in Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature. We extend our thanks Kim, my profound gratitude. to guest curator and contributing author Rachel Gotlieb, as well as exhibition and book designers Debi Perna and Eric Siegrist The idea behind this show was initiated some years ago by for taking us on a captivating journey. We also wish to thank Sue Jefferies. For that and for all she has contributed to Janet Koplos for her contribution to this publication. The Canadian ceramics, my deepest thanks. Raphael Yu kept the idea Gardiner acknowledges Steven Heinemann and all the collectors alive and has single-handedly captured a fertile period in this and institutions in Canada and the United States for lending country’s ceramic history through his passionate and dedicated works to the exhibition. collecting. I am deeply grateful to PS Design, Rachel Gotlieb, and the Gardiner leadership and staff for seeing this project Such a major retrospective would not have been possible through in its myriad details. without the generous support of our Presenting Sponsors— the Thor E. & Nicole Eaton Family Charitable Foundation and Some of the work in this show would not have come together Ira Gluskin & Maxine Granovsky Gluskin—and of our Exhibition without the help of Taimaz Moslemian. A special thanks to him, Partners: Gail and Mark Appel, David W. Binet, Lisa and John and to previous studio assistants Max Blankstein, Vivian Lee, Eaton, Linda Frum and Howard Sokolowski, Barb and Dougal Daphne Wang, Sita Wong. Macdonald, Diana Reitberger and Harry Beck, Jason Wong and Angela Jerath. We also thank Andrew and Eva Heinemann and Galleries that handle contemporary ceramics have a difficult all the kind donors who made gifts in support of the publication road in creating and nurturing a previously nonexistent of this catalogue, and recognize the support of the Raphael Yu audience. Some of these unsung heroes include dealers Centre of Canadian Ceramics. Ute Stebich, Suzanne Greenaway, Renate Wunderle, Carla Koch, David Kaye, Lucy Lacoste, Elena Lee, Avra Leodas, Nancy Margolis. Without them I would not have had a career. — Gardiner Museum And going all the way back to Williams High, props to my old pal Mel Bryan for kicking off a crazy dream. — Steven Heinemann Right: Untitled, 1991 (detail, cat. 20) 4 THIS “BEHAVIOUR” OF THE MATERIAL, WHICH DOES NOT SEEK YOUR PERMISSION, ALREADY SUGGESTS TO ME A DANCE OF NATURE AND CULTURE, MIND AND NATURE. Preface A retrospective exhibition by a major artist such as Steven Heinemann describes a fascinating journey. The present moment can sometimes appear to be an inevitable evolution from the first works, but just as often, the journey has remarkable twists and turns, unexpected influences, and a now that has little resemblance to the then. How does an artist get from there to here? The volatility of creation, the varied sources of inspiration, and the path of an artist’s life all contribute to a story, especially one that unfolds over decades. Much art is as unexpected for the artist as the viewer; it’s part of the tension of creation that keeps the next allusive and exciting. It’s an excitement difficult to portray in a retrospective but compelling when communicated. While Steven’s work is well known to connoisseurs, an exhibition that melds his brilliant work with personality and influences is a wonderful way to engage a wide audience—understanding theory and its subsequent material realization is captivating. In a museum we want to tell these stories, as well as let objects engage the viewer with their own charisma. I first understood the multi-layered aspects of Steven’s work when I was part of a studio tour he gave. Witnessing Steven explain his techniques and experiments beguiled all of us on the tour and helped us appreciate the nuance of his creations. It certainly gave the work additional layers of meaning, a very human sheen that enriched its obvious beauty and technical prowess. As we began discussing Steven’s retrospective, I wanted the exhibition, in part, to do what he did to enthrall our tour group: take us into his work by sharing his life, ideas, and a passion that sustains him in a long career, which continues to reveal something new about clay all the time. — Kelvin Browne Executive Director and CEO Gardiner Museum Pages 6–7: The exterior of Steven Heinemann’s Cookstown studio Left: Objects on display in the studio’s loft Page 10: A work area on the ground floor of the studio stevenheinemanncultureandnature 9 Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature | Rachel Gotlieb The ceramic sculptures of Steven Heinemann are astonishing, fussed about such theories and, indeed, is relaxed about how his mysterious enigmas inviting thoughts about being and non- sculptures should be viewed. For this reason he often leaves his being, the tangible and the intangible. His thirty-five-year practice pieces untitled or selects names meaningful only to him. How- is deeply rooted in the principles of the 1960s studio craft move- ever, mostly the nomenclature, as with the objects themselves, ment, which prioritizes process, material, and the non-functional evokes nature, enhancing the poetic timelessness of his material object to create autonomous sculpture.1 Put another way, mate- investigations. rial and process drive Heinemann’s creative content: he focuses on the physical conditions and constraints of making to trans- form them into new visual perceptions. To paraphrase David Pye, The Studio the eminent craft writer and teacher, Heinemann is such a skilled A creation of importance can only be master that he is able to regulate the workmanship of certainty 2 produced when its author isolates (deliberation) with the free workmanship of risk (chance). Mass, 4 volume, surface, texture, and occasionally imagery are Heine- himself, it is a child of solitude. mann’s tools to investigate the medium. He employs varying — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe degrees of scale, form, and technique, but since 1981 has mainly utilized mould slip-casting rather than throwing or hand-building. Heinemann’s ceramics come from the quiet and isolated place of While Heinemann’s formalism at times subverts and other times his studio. He chooses not to engage in recent discussions per- exploits the material to either deny or showcase many of its in- taining to the post-material, post-disciplinary, and post-museum nate properties, his explorations remain largely within its bound- —in other words, sloppy craft, sub-fabrication, and relational aries and represent a continuation as opposed to a rupture of the aesthetics.5 For twenty years, his studio was a windowless base- ceramics tradition. ment in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Since 2006 he has worked in the country in a converted horse barn just up the hill from his Heinemann’s clay sculptures, be they open vessels or closed con- heritage log-cabin residence, on a ten-acre pastoral site, near tainers, change in appearance from the chunkiness of the organic Cookstown, Ontario, a sixty-minute drive north of Toronto. to the precision of minimalism, depending upon his mode of in- quiry. And yet, there is a common thread linking his diverse body On the first floor of his studio are open shelves filled with count- of work that extends beyond his studies in the material, and that less small and large jars and vials of slips and glazes, vast quanti- is nature. Heinemann photographs snowdrifts, patterns in frozen ties of test tiles stacked side by side (like vinyl record dust jackets) ice and parched earth, and collects leaves, pods, fossils, and oth- filed according to their firing temperatures, and countless peg er fragments, which guide his thinking about form as well as the boards holding a vast array of potter’s tools (fig.2). Most strik- pre-cultural and the cultural worlds (fig.1). His ceramics—some- ing is the large inventory of his ceramics: vessels, bowls, and times intimate, other times monumental—operate on a meta- containers in all shapes and sizes and in various stages of com- phorical level, serving as touchstones at once connecting and un- pletion from bisque to glazed work. Pinned on the walls are dermining our interaction with plants, animals, and ancient spirits. Heinemann’s sketches (drawing to visualize formalistic issues is His thinking indirectly references the theories of anthropologists a critical part of his process), and inspirational objects and im- Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who employed ages: the foil lid from a yogurt container, a poster of the Spanish the culture-nature dichotomy as a method to decipher myths and Alhambra (which he visited in 2010), or a picture of the American rituals. Philippe Descola and others have recently argued that the ceramist Bill Daley, his friend and mentor. Despite or because of nature-culture binary is arbitrary; instead, nature should be criti- the volume of potter’s paraphernalia, everything is efficiently in cally examined in culture and vice versa.3 Heinemann is not too its place and space is divided according to function, including stevenheinemanncultureandnature 11 Early Work All the works of men which have been most admired since the beginning of history have been made by the workmanship of risk.9 — David Pye Art history and criticism have generally been unkind to ceram- ics, viewing it as a poor candidate for sculpture.