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

• Glenn Barkley

  Glenn Barkley

  Glenn Barkley is an artist, writer, curator and gardener based in Sydney and Berry NSW, Australia. His work operates in the space between these interests drawing upon the history of ceramics, popular song, the garden and conversations about art and the internet. Recent major exhibitions include imayimightimust, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2018); yetmorecontemporaryart, Artspace, Sydney (2017); the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object, Art Gallery of South Australia (2016); The Garden of Earthly Delights, Westspace, Melbourne (with Angela Brennan) (2016); Watching Clouds Pass the Moon, Lake Macquarie Regional Gallery, NSW (2016); and Glazed and Confused: Ceramics in Contemporary Art Practice, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, NSW (2014). Barkley was previously senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2008–14) and curator of the University of Wollongong Art Collection (1996–2007). He is co-founder and co-director of The Curators Department, Sydney and of kil.n.it experimental ceramics studio Glebe, Sydney. He was a finalist in the 2017 Sidney Myer Ceramics Award and is held in numerous collections both nationally and internationally, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Shepparton Art Museum and Artbank Sydney.

• Kate Jones

  Kate Jones

  Kate Jones has completed a Diploma of Art (Ceramics) and a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) with honours at RMIT. She was awarded the Trudie Alfred Bequest in 2013, the Craft Victoria Fresh award in 2014 and the Victorian Craft Award for Ceramics in 2015. Kate has been an integral part of the School of Clay and Art’s evolution, involved in teaching, research and studio management. Her private studio is based there. Kate’s work encompasses an exhibition practice; a strong investment in education that brings together philosophical enquiry into the fields of ontology and epistemology with a solid methodological base; and a simple love of throwing functional pots. These broad interests continue to inform her involvement in the development of SoCA’s physical and theoretical structures. IMAGE CREDITS portrait: Darcy Kent artwork: Andrew Barcham

• Kevin Murray

  Kevin Murray

  Dr Kevin Murray is an independent writer and curator, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Major current roles are managing editor for Garland Magazine and the Online Encyclopedia of Crafts in the Asia Pacific Region. In 2000-2007 he was Director of Craft Victoria where he developed the Scarf Festival and the South Project, a four-year program of exchange involving Melbourne, Wellington, Santiago and Johannesburg.  He has curated many exhibitions, including 'Signs of Change: Jewellery Designed for a Better World';  'The World of Small Things'; 'Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions'; 'Water Medicine: Precious Works for an Arid Continent'; 'Guild Unlimited: Ten Jewellers Make Insignia for Potential Guilds'; 'Seven Sisters: Fibre Works from the West';  'Common Goods: Cultures Meet through Craft' for the 2006 Commonwealth Games and Joyaviva: Live Jewellery Across the Pacific that toured Latin America.  His books include Judgement of Paris: Recent French Thought in an Australian Context (Allen & Unwin, 1991), Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and with Damian Skinner, Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand (Bateman, 2014). He is currently a Senionr Vice-President of the World Craft Council Asia Pacific Region, coordinator of Southern Perspectives and Sangam: A Platform for Craft-Design Parnerships. He teaches at RMIT University, the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University and University of New South Wales. click here to go to Kevin’s website

• Leonard Smith

  Leonard Smith

  LEONARD SMITH – “rust never sleeps” I started potting in 1970, so next year marks 50 years as a potter. It was during a visit to the V&A Museum in London, where they developed a system of very tall pot filled glass cabinets called “Storage on Display”, that I realised that there were many more pots in storage than were ever displayed to the public. I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to access these hidden pots I needed to have some form of academic credentials, so he I enrolled in post graduate studies at ANU. From my early days as a student at East Sydney Tech I had a fascination with the high iron glaze the Japanese called Tenmoku and which I came to know a Jian Shan and as fortune would happen it was that glaze that I chose as the subject of my research. This was to beginning of my “Journey into the Heart of Darkness”. A very full description of this journey can be found on my blog tenmoku.org. Leonard is a Past President and Life Member of the Potters Society of Australia (ACA) a co-author of a Handbook for Australian Potters, an editor of Pottery in Australia and the Current President of the Ceramic Study Group. “ When I first joined the Committee of the Potters Society of Australia in 1976, I suggested that we needed a National Conference. It is to the credit of that Committee that they ran with that idea and the first conference was held in 1978 and I went on Chair the 1981 conference, the very beginning of the Australian Ceramic Triennials.”

• Shane Kent

  Shane Kent

  Shane Kent trained as a potter in Japan and Australia before completing a Bachelor of Fine Art (Ceramics), post-graduate studies in sculpture and education, and a Masters in Drawing. He taught the Diploma of Art (Ceramics) at Box Hill TAFE from 1989-2011.  He has been exhibiting in Melbourne since 1985, most recently at Australian Galleries.  Since 2011 he has undertaken major ceramic commissions through design studio Projects of Imagination for custom tableware, lighting, bespoke tiles and artwork. Shane has a deep interest in explanations of creative processes, which he continues to explore in his own practice and his teaching.    Both the studio environment at SoCA and his approach to teaching are informed by an intention to inspire and nurture creative emergence, open up ways of seeing, bring awareness to creative processes and foster the independence necessary to a sustainable art practice. click here to go to the SoCA website

• Ursula Burgoyne

  Ursula Burgoyne

  Biography: Ursula Burgoyne I have been making ceramics for over twenty years now, interspersed with a career in language education in Australia and Papua New Guinea. My interest in clay has always been related to wood firing, initially because I lived where this was possible and wood was readily available, and later as an abiding obsession to explore how you can make something interesting, beautiful, even useful from clay and wood as people around the world have done in their own ways for thousands of years. I now live in Sydney, make my work there, and fire it in Moruya on the far south coast of NSW. My studies in ceramics were at the Canberra School of Art in the early 1980s and more recently at Gymea TAFE where I completed an Advanced Diploma in Ceramics in 2012. I loved being a student, not because it refined my ideas about what I wanted to make, but because it was such a bombshell of learning, stimulation and play. Because there is no longstanding tradition of Australian ceramics that predicates and sets notional standards for what anyone should make with clay, we are free to explore ceramics traditions from all over the world for inspiration and knowledge, and free to develop new questions about making and firing . We are free to incorporate elements from anything that excites our creative energy, whether it is painting, textiles, sculpture, the natural world, or our local surroundings . I like to take advantage of all these freedoms in my work. In the past few years I have been involved in small group shows in Sydney, and recently the groups have included ex-colleagues from my language education days, so the two parts of my professional life have finally and happily coalesced. Cosmic Plate 2016 Stoneware with porcelain inlay, wood fired 18cm diam; 3 cm h Ursula Burgoyne