About
I create everything from a small studio in Fitzroy North crafting each piece either on the wheel or by hand.
I started making pottery in January 2020, a few months before the pandemic hit. It was something I'd been imagining doing for years, and so I embarked on a wheel-throwing course, and then another. When the first lockdown was announced, one of the first things I did was buy myself a wheel. I continued to throw on the wheel while moving into hand-building, making sculptural vases as well as figurative pieces. Finally, I got a permanent studio, upgraded my wheel, and added a little kiln to the family. I started attending SoCA, the School of Clay and Art, where I began to learn about creating my own glazes, and where I continue to practise and learn.
The study of ceramics is infinite. It asks the maker to listen, observe, slow down. It links you to time and place. Sometimes I will go out to Taungurung country and dig clay that can be used either to make items or in a glaze. I collect wood-ash out there too, to use in glazes.
Ceramics is elemental, bringing us into contact with the very substance of the earth from which we are sustained. It is a conversation through time, an endless interrogation of materiality. Every clay body interacts with a glaze differently, with heat differently, and will respond differently if thrown, coiled, scratched, carved, made into a flat or vertical surface. It will be changed by light, by its context, and by its contents; be it food, tea, flowers or emptiness.
Making ceramics takes time. It requires patience, not just in perfecting a form or a glaze, but through the drying, through both of its firings. Sometimes a piece is beautiful in its form alone, requiring little from a glaze but that it respects the line and curvature of the piece. But many times, a finished product requires weeks of testing to arrive at a result that is not only fit for purpose but that expresses something of its making. Mostly, it's one long experiment.
I hope that through my work, you are able to take a moment for yourself, to stop, to rest and to contemplate, to be present as you drink your coffee, or admire a beautiful bunch of fresh flowers in a vase on your tabletop.