Little-known outside Chicago, but remembered and revered by many local artists, Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009) practiced a sculptural ceramics of sprawling ambition and uncanny biomorphism, vividly illustrating the potential of a medium too often confined to utilitarian and decorative employments. Students at the University of Chicago may know her, if not by name, as the author of Earth, Water, and Sky (1968), the massive clay relief that spans all four walls and the ceiling of the foyer at the Hinds Geophysical Sciences Laboratory.  

Installation view of Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity at the Smart Museum. Photo by the author.

Invited to teach ceramics at the University’s Midway Studios in 1964, Duckworth forged close ties with her colleagues in the geophysical sciences, accepting a commission for a work for the department’s new laboratory soon after her 1965 exhibition at the Renaissance Society. She drew inspiration for her vast wall reliefs from aerial images of cloud formations and tornado damage zones supplied by her friend Ted Fujita, a geophysical scientist nicknamed “Mr. Tornado.” 

The Smart Museum’s exhibition sets Duckworth’s monumental reliefs in conversation with other aspects of her wide-ranging sculptural practice, from rough “mama pots” to playful anthropo- and zoomorphic porcelain “figures.” In a display defined by formal contrasts, sleek white figures reminiscent of penguins and their stolid companions in dark stoneware draw the eye back and forth between textures and shapes. Along the walls, reliefs unrestrained in their roughness or gooeyness alternate with smooth porcelain compositions of regular curves, all unnervingly redolent of the body.

Such a rich range of materials and forms conveys a sense of abundance that only grows as one approaches the works individually. Jutting out from the surface of the clay relief Clouds over Illinois (1985), for instance, jagged fins suggest the spine of some prehistoric beast as readily as storm clouds in perpetual suspense. Seen up close, however, these ridges shimmer with a vibrant blue glaze that softens their forbidding thrust.

Though organic shapes dominate these works, some of Duckworth’s sleeker figures betray hints of the technological. The top of one rare bronze figure resembles the handlebars of a motorcycle as well as the head of a snail, while another gray stoneware figure terminates in an appendage that recalls a propeller blade.

In light of her intense concern with the dawning environmental crisis, Duckworth’s notion of “life as unity” may suggest hippie dreams of a return to communion with nature that would exclude the technological. Her art, however, responds to these environmental and political conditions with an outpouring of passionate curiosity about the physical world that transcends the hippie’s ineffectual romanticism. Fascinated by the perspectives on the earth made possible by satellite technology and given meaning by a scientific pursuit of knowledge and progress, Duckworth explored a world no less natural for being mediated by the technologies of the human animal—a unity of life that, for better or for worse, encompassed the uncanny as well as the charming, and the fashioned as well as the grown. 

Lauren Rooney