But in the 1980s she turned away from production pottery to making porcelain still-life groups largely influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.

Hanssen Pigott’s first introduction to ceramics was in the 1950s while a university student, taken with the Kent Collection of Chinese and Korean wares at the National Gallery of Victoria.

[7] At that time all clay bodies had to be made from hand-processed raw ceramic materials, as they were not available as commercially pre-mixed products.

While at Sturt Pottery, Hanssen Pigott came to appreciate the given and induced qualities of clay in addition to learning to admire form and beauty in a pot.

In 1960 she left Cornwall with her newlywed poet husband, Louis Hanssen to establish with him a studio in Portobello Road, London.

Under the name Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, she and her husband set up a pottery workshop in Tasmania with financial help from the Crafts Board of the Australia Council.

Having to "work with gas … I threw porcelain table settings, usually blue-grey or green celadon with a range of washed-out shino-type colours.

"[3] She continued this work 1981–1989 as potter in residence at the Queensland University of Technology: gas-fired dinner settings, wood-fired pots decorated with tiny patterns of indigo, ultimately picked out in gold.

Catching up with developments of the previous decade and reconnecting with her peers, she was overcome by a sense of "shallowness" and lack of "humanness" in her work.

In this period she was based in country Queensland but showed her work especially through Garry Anderson (1956–1991) and his austere gallery in Sydney.

[13] She hints in her Autobiographical Notes that this distancing was encouraged by seeing so much of country Queensland from the air as a teacher for the Australian Flying Arts School.

[2] In 2005, the National Gallery of Victoria held a retrospective exhibition Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: A Survey 1955–2005 with a 112-page catalogue.

[17] In addition to her adherence to the aesthetic of the Song Dynasty wares, Hanssen Pigott describes her own sense of form, which is aligned with the Cardew–Leach philosophy of the importance of the everyday and of humility in pottery: Hanssen Piggot might have come to arranging her work in groupings as still life compositions reluctantly, but it was definitely not without influences.

Hanssen Piggot describes her interest in the paintings of Italian Giorgio Morandi in her essay Truth in Form: Pulled-Back Simplicity.

Provincial galleries in Ballarat, Bathurst, Bendigo, Cairns, Castlemaine, Darwin, Devonport, Federation University Australia; Geelong, Gippsland, Gladstone, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Launceston, Newcastle, Orange, Shepparton, Stanthorpe and Townsville.