Speakers for this event

• Dr Curt McDonald

  Dr Curt McDonald

  Heat, cold, pressure, time. Time. Soft dust, hard cliff, everywhere. Waiting. A road cut shows you ancient interior, a secret vault, seeing sun for the first time in a hundred million years. Curt McDonald is a ceramic artist based in Perth. His work communicates the beauty and richness of Western Australia's vast landscape and geological legacy through clay, using natural materials found and developed in WA. Curt distils and decants the materials of the bush into the vessel itself at the most fundamental level. Simple, iconic forms reference familiar shapes from our natural environment, invoking subconscious remembrance of place and the comfort it brings. The significant endeavour of locating, refining and transforming these unique natural materials is rewarded by rich, multi-layered colours and textures, which channel the quiet warmth and vibrance of the WA landform. Traditional firing methods - including the ancient magic of the wood kiln - bring out the soul of these endemic materials. This work addresses an inherent contradiction in contemporary ceramic practice. There are few mediums in which the origin of the raw materials is as important to the final appearance of the work as in ceramics. The current yearning to return to the authentic and the bespoke sails hard into the wind of a streamlined global supply chain in which few - if any - of the materials we use come from the places we belong to. Curt's work rediscovers and expresses WA's timeless geological signature, and embodies an authentic reference to place. artwork: Untitled (2017), thrown stoneware, slip and other native materials, 88 x 15 cm, photoghrapher Rob Frith