sculptor, ceramicist, painter, photographer, poet, pacifist, garden designer, horsewoman and sometime riding teacher, was a professional by training and track-record even if her range makes her seem a dilettante – though never an amateur. She described her restless nature in lines from Sonnet :
The unexpected waits and calls to me,
Though present joys delight, they also serve
To wake a longing for variety…
Born at Cowra (NSW) in 1905, Clare McMahon spent much of her youth in rural Australia, growing up with a love of gardens, landscape and the natural environment. She studied painting and drawing for three years at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School but thereafter did little work in these media, although she took innumerable photographs for personal visual records. Realising that she was happier working in three dimensions than two, she went to England to study sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art in the 1930s.
After a brief wartime marriage contracted in England, she returned to Australia as Clare Pitman, the name she used professionally for the rest of her life. She worked as a military transport driver in Queensland, then moved to Sydney after the war in order to nurse her ageing parents. Having turned seriously to pottery, the only place she could find for a studio was her parents’ garage, granted to her as long as the car was not permanently displaced. Her electric kiln could be fired up safely only at midnight in order to avoid the ruinous effects of blackouts, then still a frequent occurrence due to post-war power restrictions. The technical merit of Korean Lion is all the more impressive when these obstacles to its creation are known.
In her later years Clare Pitman travelled widely, spending much time in England where she had a cottage and studio. In Australia she increasingly emphasised her sculptural work, specialising in portrait heads and traditional figures. Her late career trajectory is summarised by the fact that her 1975 solo show was 'sculpture and ceramics’ but her last, in 1980, was 'sculptures in bronze and clay’. It is, however, arguable that the peak of her artistic achievement was reached when she was working in the medium of ceramics in the 1940s and 1950s in Sydney.
- Writers:
- Dolan, David
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
