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This page is briefly about the Australian artist, (Helen) Margaret Dodd which concentrates on her work during her Davis years. David (Gilhooly) and I are in contact with her off and on through email and an occassional postcard. The text in italics on this page is taken from her emails to me.
Everything that I have been able to glean from David and Margaret and the
various paper clippings and catalogs that David saved through the years
is on this page. I have included some links to relevant images of Margaret's
work and clicking on these will open another window instead of taking you
off this one. One of the frustations encountered with using newspaper, magazine
and catalog 
sources for Margaret's work is that the commetary was often
reduced to only three or four lines that simply state that Helen Dodd was
from Australia, she made "Baroque" cars in TB-9, and was the only
woman of the TB-9 group.
Art is a very daunting and demanding commitment to make for anyone. You're taking a really big jump off a really high cliff when you commit your life to making art for a living. People will tell you that you won't make it because you don't have enough talent. Your parents will tell you to major in something where you'll make a living or at least have a back up in teaching. They may even tell you to get back to reality because nobady makes a living in The Arts. Add to all this being a woman who wants marriage and children as well as a career in the arts and you have major obstacles. But I didn't expect the media to be a contributing factor to these obstacles. I expected the show catalogs to at least provide a little more information on the work or at least as much information as was provided for the other artists.
I think one reason there's not much about me is because I came back to Australia and was wiped off the US ceramics map. I know this because Lee Nordness* came round buying work for Objects USA, must have been in 1968. He got the Club Car (the Kombi with the women), and the Cadillac and the wrecked Passat. But when they found out I had left the US they disqualified me from the show... I think... dont know really..I wasn't there. Art seems to be a very tribal national business at times...
*Lee Nordness was a New York gallery owner who went to the West Coast to buy art for the the Johnson Wax Collection. These new acquisitions were shown in Objects USA and were included in a catalog for the show.
Way back, when David taught ceramic sculpture, he'd always start the first hour of class by showing slides of other artists' work and explained how each artist worked and who they were. His Margaret Lecture was about overcoming obstacles of time and space when juggling marriage and children while pursuing art, how you as a student needed to work and if you had children then you worked at home, but you worked.
Margaret made cars by first starting out with the chasis and building up and out. Because Margaret was married and had a child at home, she would make it to class and work in TB-9 during class hours and go home. This may account for the reason so little is written about her and her work. She was at home working and not as accessable as the other TB-9 people. There is a piece, which we (David and I) unfortunately have no slide for, of a wrecked Passat. It's a sculpture of a VW with a squashed front end.
I do have a slide I'm sure of the VW Passat i think it was, that got wrecked on my kitchen floor but rose again. I think i had borrowed a sculpture stand from TB9 to make it. One whizz too many and it flew off. I thought that at least the inside was exposed, and that was hidden before.
Because Margaret's cars were so well made, the piece wasn't reduced to an unrecognizable blob. David's point to the Margaret Lecture was also, that when you're forced to overcome obstacles or work in different circumstances than everyone else, sometimes a chance occurance happens that you can take advantage of.
So, why is Margaret Dodd, an Australian, wearing a US Post Office shirt at the top 
of this page? Well, TB-9 not only housed the ceramics studios at the University of California at Davis, but also the post office, the police office, campus sign painters and was storage for experimental canned goods. When the post office moved out of TB-9, Margaret somehow managed to snag the shirt and used it as a her studio work shirt.
Margaret came to TB-9 in the fall of 1965 and took a throwing class from Robert Arneson.
I came to be at Davis because my husband got a job in the physics dept. We drove to Davis from New Haven Connecticut, arriving on Independence Day, 1965, after he had been at Yale for a year, with John, about to turn 1, in the back of the Rambler American. I had been an art teacher in Australia for 4 and a half years and wanted to do more study. At first I audited courses, then got credit for them.
She officially enrolled in 1966 and earned her BA in 1967.
TB9 was exciting because there were people from all over the arts dept, and Uni in there, not just potters and sculptors but painters and poets and jazz musicians, conceptual artists and they all did things together.
I wanted to do an MA, but my husband took a job back here in Adelaide, and
we
left at the end of 1968, to my great disappointment. Being in the 1966
Museum West (chocolate factory) exhibition and having a one person show at
the Davis Union Gallery in 1967 or 8 were great experiences, and gave me confidence
to have more shows in Australia. My ceramic heart is still in California.
The Museum West exhibition was an exhibition, Ceramics from Davis by the American Craftmen's Council at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, CA, in 1966. Pieces by Margaret (listed as Helen) Dodd, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, Steven Kaltenbach, Peter VandenBerge, and Chris Unterseher were also included. Works of Margaret's included a 1956 Cadillac, 1940 Oldsmobile, 1948 Buick, and a VW. There were articles about this show in Crafts Horizon, Nov./Dec. 1966 as well as in various newspapers.
In 1974-5 Margaret found herself working in Den Haag (Struktuur 68) in The Netherlands, with two children and her husband, where she made boats. Then it was back to Australia.
Australia has never consistently nurtured a culture of ceramic sculpture the way TB9 did, along with the galleries in Calif. and the rest of the US. I love going back. My best ceramic pieces in Australia have been the iconic (now) Holden cars of the 40's and fifties, especially the ones I made for a film, "This Woman is Not a Car", which were a Holden Bride, one with hair curlers, and so on. I still do ceramic sculpture, as well as video and film projects. Live and work in Adelaide, South Australia.
Created 05 June 2005
Revised 24 January 2008