Speakers for this event

• Alicja Patanowska

  Alicja Patanowska

  In her artistic practice, Alicja Patanowska combines glass with porcelain, and visual arts with designing, always aiming to engage the audience. What is characteristic of her art is the recurrent topic of waste. She considers craft skills to be crucial for her artistic practice as she designs and learns through the making process. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in London (2014) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław (2012). Her products are available in many places, including Merci in Paris, London’s Barbican and New York’s MoMA. The laureate of a number of awards, such as Gazeta Wyborcza’s WARTO (2017), must have!, (2016), British Glass Biennial (2015), her works also form a part of several art and design collections, one of which belongs to the Shanghai Museum of Glass. click here to go to Alicja’s website Image: Of Mice and Men (2016), porcelain, taxidermia photographer: Alicja Kielan

• Anna-Marie Wallace

  Anna-Marie Wallace

  Anna-Marie Wallace is a British born, Australian artist of Italian & Scottish heritage. She is an Industrial Designer turned Ceramicist, who began her short but avid foray into the world of clay in 2012 with Made OF Australia, a saggar firing business whose art, jewellery, & tableware are coveted by retailers, galleries, stylists, photographers, high end restaurants, & renowned chefs globally. She introduced Liquid Quartz to the ceramic arts market in 2015, after years of research & development into finding a solution to the age old issue of food safety & unglazed surfaces. She openly discusses & shares the technology used to make her pieces food safe, with the hope of allowing others to expand their alternative firing ceramic practices too. She is an outspoken advocate for the death of “starving artist” syndrome, & runs workshops, mentorship programmes, & internships to teach others how to market & sell their art, as well as run a sustainable, & profitable, arts based practice. She works solely with Australian clays, native flora, & waste from Indigenous fauna (Pandanus, Macadamia, Bunya, Magpie Goose feathers, Crocodile eggshell, Koala scat, Dugong seagrass, & calcified seaweeds & corals to name a few), foraged in her local area or sent in by friends from The Northern Territory to Tasmania. The unpredictable & unrepeatable finish of each piece tells a unique story of origins & process. Her creations pay homage to all that was destroyed to create them; they are pieces OF Australia, each as individual as you are. click here to go to Anna Marie’s website Image: Minimalist Plate (28cm); Australian Porcelain Saggar Fired with Pandanus, Macadamia, Dugong Seagrass, & Crocodile Eggshell (Range produced 2016-2018) Tiger Myrtle hand carved spoon also by the artist. Image Credit: Michelle Eabry

• Dr Sandy Lockwood

  Dr Sandy Lockwood

  Dr Sandy Lockwood has been working with clay, wood-firing and salt-glazing as well as developing and building kilns since 1980. Her ceramic works have been widely exhibited and are represented in public and private collections in Australia, UK, USA, Europe, Korea, China and Japan. Her work has been published in journals and books and she has been a presenter on wood-firing internationally. Sandy holds a Masters of Visual Arts and a PhD. She has taught at a number of tertiary institutions and is currently a lecturer at the National Art School, Sydney. At her studio in Balmoral Village in the Southern highlands of NSW, Sandy makes and teaches occasional short courses and introductory woodfiring workshops. click here to go to Sandy’s website Portrait: Michael Wee

• Hayley Panangka Coulthard

  Hayley Panangka Coulthard

  Hayley Panangka Coulthard was born in Hermannsburg, daughter of fellow Hermannsburg Potter Anita Ratara. Joining the Hermannsburg Potters in 2009, Coulthard has established herself as a prominent member of the group, developing her raw natural talent under the mentorship of Senior Potters Judith Inkamala and Rahel Ungwanaka. Her work is known for its incorporation of ceramic relief methods, which plays on the Hermannsburg Potters' multidimensional style. Like her mother Anita, Hayley chooses to depict her traditional Country, Palm Valley, in her work, and the associated Willy Wagtail Dreaming. As an emerging artist of the Hermannsburg Potters, Hayley Coulthard is known for producing work of both a high technical standard and of artistic merit. Having participated in numerous group exhibitions in Australia, she was invited to exhibit in the 2010 collaborative exhibition Meou Art: Exhibition of Australian Indigenous Art in Shanghai, China. This significant international exhibition showcased the work of artists from the Northern Territory's Hermannsburg Potters, Warlukurlangu Artists and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre. Hayley Coulthard is also renowned for her delightful AFL footy pots, her work St Kilda versus Collingwood being acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2011. She has since gone on to be a part of the significant 2016 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition, Our Land is Alive - Hermannsburg Potters for Kids, where twenty AFL-themed pots were commissioned to tell the story of the game's history, particularly as it has unfolded in the footy fanatic community of Hermannsburg. Hayley served on the Desart Incorporated Board from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a director on the Hermannsburg Potters Board and Desart Board.

• Judith Pungkarta Inkamala

  Judith Pungkarta Inkamala

  Judith is a founding member of Hermannsburg Potters. Judith's work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia over the past 30 years and she has travelled extensively, both nationally and internationally over this time to represent the Hermannsburg Potters. Her pots reflect a predisposition for balanced, symmetrical objects and reveal an accomplished hand in the craftsmanship. Inkamala takes inspiration from her Western Aranda country and transforms these visions into wonderfully crafted terracotta pots and occasionally paintngs on canvas. Her pots are beautfully crafted and show a great attention to detail. Her paintings seem to invite her pots into the landscape - as skillfully painted as the pot is constructed. Judith Inkamala has had a long-standing association with creative work and as a child was known to spend time at the Albert Namatjira household as she was great friends with his grand-daughter Gloria. As a child, Judith recalls watching the famous Albert Namatjira and his kinsmen painting in the camp near the Mission, going to the painters' camp after school and watching the men paint. Her historical works on the Hermannsburg Mission and, as well as her works on the Namatjira story, are of particular interest to collectors both in Australia and internationally. In 2010 Judith accompanied Rahel Ungwanaka to China to showcase their pottery to ceramic artists for the collaborative exhibition Meou Art: Exhibition of Australian Indigenous Art in Shanghai, China.

• Kenji Uranishi

  Kenji Uranishi

  Kenji Uranishi is an Australian-based, Japanese artist who explores ideas around nature and the built environment, place and belonging. Kenji studied at the Nara College of Fine Arts and began his career in Japan working mostly with stoneware clay. A move to Australia in 2004 signalled a critical shift in his practice as he began working predominantly with porcelain, hand building translucent white, often architecturally inspired objects. A turning point came in 2014 when he received an Asialink residency (funded by Arts Queensland) to spend 12 weeks in Arita in Kyushu – a place many consider to be the birthplace of porcelain in Japan. During that time, Kenji worked with local craftspeople, designers and artists to explore new directions in his ceramic practice, including with a master mould maker who shared the techniques of his craft. Returning to Australia, Kenji continued to explore this process and began hand-carving moulds for slip casting to construct and expand modular forms. He first showed the results of this work, in combination with slab-built sculptural pieces, in his 2016 solo exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane, Momentary. Comprising 50 sculptures, the installation captured Kenji’s interest in the wild and unfamiliar aspects of the Australian environment, and the light and patterns in architecture, nature and everyday life. Kenji’s artworks are held in a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, and feature in public spaces including 400 George Street, Brisbane and the Ipswich Courthouse, Queensland. During 2018, he was undertaking three new public art projects. Kenji lives and works in Brisbane. click here to go to Kenji’s website Image: Danpen X (2018), slipcast porcelain, 5 x 34 x 34cm

• Nancy Fuller

  Nancy Fuller

  Nancy Fuller is Taiwanese by birth but was raised in the North East of Scotland. Having trained as a printmaker, she went on to attain a Masters in the History of Art and Archaeology of Asia in 1999 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. A Chinese language scholarship took her back to Taiwan in 2000 to explore her roots and whilst there she found a sense of connection through the ancient ways of pottery. After studying at various studios her discovery of anagama-fired pottery was like the missing jigsaw piece. In addition to language, culture and tradition, it embraced the natural environment, and in essence revealed the Taiwan she was looking for through the medium of wood-firing. Her quest to build her own kiln resulted in her undertaking a year-long training with anagama master Suzuki Shigeji in Shigaraki, Japan, supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. During her training she was also a resident artist at the Shigaraki Cultural Ceramic Park and it was there that she met Karatsu master, Nakazato Takashi. Realising his ‘Nanban’ aesthetic might suit the clays available to her in the UK, she studied reduction cooling with him at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, USA, through support from the Scottish Arts Council. What emerged from this was a firing aesthetic which she feels embodies her own character and background. All her work is fired in an anagama which she designed and built herself on a croft in rural Aberdeenshire.

• Neville Assad-Salha

  Neville Assad-Salha

  Neville Assad-Salha studied at the South Australian School of Art from 1973 to 1976. He has been a practising ceramist/ potter for over 40 years. He has held many solo exhibitions and group shows. Neville taught ceramics at many universities in Melbourne and Adelaide. He is a former professor at the University of Beirut. He has attended many international symposiums. Neville lives between South Australia and Lebanon.

• Sergei Isupov

  Sergei Isupov

  My work portrays characters placed in situations that are drawn from my imagination but based on my life experiences. My art works capture a composite of fleeting moments, hand gestures, eye movements that follow and reveal the sentiments expressed. These details are all derived from actual observations but are gathered or collected over my lifetime. Through the drawn images and sculpted forms, I capture faces, body types and use symbolic elements to compose, in the same way as you might create a collage. These ideas drift and migrate throughout my work without direct regard to specific individuals, chronology or geography. Universalism is implied and personal interpretation expected. Through my work I get to report about and explore human encounters, comment on the relationships between man and woman, and eventually their sexual union that leads to the final outcome – the passing on of DNA which is the ultimate collection – a combined set of genes and a new life, represented in the child. Everything that surrounds and excites me is automatically processed and transformed into...an artwork. The essence of my work is not in the medium or the creative process, but in the human beings and their incredible diversity. When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them, perhaps they create me. click here to go to Sergei’s website Image: Reflection 2007 - 14 (2014), porcelain, slip, glaze. 10 x 14 x 5"