Sonja Landweer

Lidded pot, 1976

Footnotes

Provenance
Sonja Landweer, Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland
Thence by descent to the present owner

Sonja Landweer (1933 – 2019)

Internationally acclaimed Dutch artist, Sonja Landweer was born in Amsterdam in 1933. She first studied ceramics at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, before establishing her own ceramics studio in 1954. As a young artist she was selected to exhibit at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam – an exhibition that showcased the revival of artisan ceramics in the Netherlands.

Although trained as a ceramicist, a discipline in which she excelled and where she ceaselessly pushed the boundaries far beyond the limits of traditional function, her restless creativity and innovative practice was not limited to this medium, and throughout her life, she also explored the creative potential of drawing, printmaking, jewellery, and sculpture.

Her connection to Ireland came about as a result of a 1961 Irish Export Board report on the state of Irish design which concluded that it was a wholly neglected area, badly in need of revitalisation. As a result of this report the Irish government of the day established a series of residencies for international artists and Sonja came to Ireland to teach ceramics at the Kilkenny Design Workshops. Her work came to the attention of Irish gallerist David Hendricks, and she held many successful solo exhibitions of her unique ceramics in his Dublin gallery from the 1960's to the 1980's.

It was also in Ireland that she met and fell in love with the English artist, Barrie Cooke who had moved to Ireland in the 1950's. Together with Cooke, she founded the Kilkenny Arts Festival (formerly the Kilkenny Arts Week) and hosted many Irish and international writers, poets, and artists, including Seamus Heaney. In 1995 when accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Heaney read his poem To a Dutch Potter in Ireland, inspired by his friendship with Sonja.
As an artist, Sonja developed a very personal and experimental artistic vocabulary in a variety of mediums, and her work often incorporated found objects, slate, bone, beads, wood, paper, and other fibres. Her fearlessness in her creative expression and her desire to explore and push creative boundaries is perfectly captured by the Irish Times art critic, Aidan Dunne, in his review of her retrospective exhibition at Visual Carlow in when he said that "she is not afraid to harness wild, almost uncontrollable processes and materials in pursuit of elegantly poised forms and surfaces".

Her work is held in many public collections including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden, the Hildesheim Städtisches Museum in Germany, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Copenhagen, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. She was awarded the prix artistique at the Biennale Internationale de Ceramique d'Art at Vallauris, France in 1974, an honorary award from the National College of Art & Design in Dublin in 1992 and invited to become a member of Aosdana, the prestigious Irish association of artists in 1981.