Saly Noémi (szerk.): Gorka Lívia keramikusművész (Budapest, 2010)
Kollin András: Bibliográfia
oxide glazes "softened” the forms. She herself always referred to materials, forms and everything that her works meant to her in a perfectly simple fashion.37 On the photographs taken of her while working we can clearly see her total immersion, her struggle with the materials, the experience of total preoccupation with the creation in hand. She handled clay with a confidence more typical of sculptors, structuring and shaping it into Lívia Gorka, the Sculptor The success of the exhibitions in Veszprém and Keszthely, the recognition and encouragement of Miklós Borsos, brought her a great will to work and a renewal in her art. From this point on she lived only to create, producing no more decorative art items and gradually cutting back the commissions from the Képcsarnok and Artex Company, it is from this time that she begins to treat her ceramic material as solely the base material of sculpture, which she handles with incredible steadiness and courage. She kneads and forms the chamot clay, a result of her own experimentation, like a sculptor. The other important "component part” of the creative process is fire. It is fire that confirms and realises her ideas. She has often stated that it is her greatest ally; that fire rules over her yet she is its master. In the mid-sixties the hilly region around the north shore of Lake Balaton provided a new theme for her art. At Csopak, near the Tihany peninsula, an old peasant house bought close to those of Miklós Borsos, Gyula Illyés and other prominent artists and writers was the source of new inspiration to her art. After knowing the bank of the Danube at Verőce, the tiny details of nature, the movement of the water and the behaviour of the loamy soil of those surroundings, she immersed herself in a radically different environment. She encounters conditions of nature and light totally different to those around the river. Here the soil is different, the rocks are different and even the gleaming white lime walls of the peasant houses are different. And so are the people who live there. She never ceases to enjoy the experience of the village's quiet, still life, which takes the desired form. Because she had a precise knowledge of the processes which took place during firing, she could also work confidently with clay and glazes from a technical perspective. It is no accident that her critics had difficulty in finding the words to adequately describe her works. Her works were most often compared to paintings of nature and geological formations.38 her back to olden days, to ancient peasant times. Her metal-combined birds change to become increasingly like stone sculptures. The marabou, seagulls, and squatting, spherical birds are all from this period. In addition to these, a new theme appears in her art: a series of old peasant women and girls. She shapes them in large, peasant shawls, in a block-like way. The heads and faces are only depicted on the form in a stylised way. Her sculpture-like forms stand before us with the conciseness of a ballad, silently personifying a long-passed world. Her grouped, vertically elongated, stylised sculptures of women were given a different, more dramatic emphasis.39 These works have an even richer meaning: they show us the past as a group. "I'd like to reproduce the nature of the soil - she said once during an interview. - Aurél Vajkai once wrote a short book on the Balaton uplands, in which I discovered the soil of a small village in the Bakony region and that it was an excellent tool for the production of my natural-effect glazes... But for other reasons too. I feel sorry for the slowly derelict little village houses and for the people there who are strangely secluded, as if left here from olden times. I would like to capture and record their land using the tools of my craft, but not simply as decoration, \'d like to express this in an autonomously appreciated visual form through my sculptures and wall-paintings."40 In 1973, her exhibition at the Műcsarnok, which introduced the works she had created during the previous three years, acted as a revelation. Observing the reforming of mass-production, the individual design approach and formal environment, the public, fellow professionals and the art world came face to face with 41
