Speakers for this event

• Andrei Davidoff

  Andrei Davidoff

  Andrei Davidoff is a ceramic artist based in Melbourne, Australia. His practice includes both functional utilitarian ware as well as conceptual installation and sculpture. His ceramic pieces are predominantly wheel-thrown and are made in his home studio. Andrei completed his BFA followed by a Masters in Fine Arts at RMIT University in 2012. He has received several Australia Council grants and exhibits regularly throughout Australia. Since 2012 Andrei has been working as a studio potter, creating custom designed ceramics for some of Australia's most loved and highly regarded restaurants. His functional flatware finds influences throughout the world’s greatest culinary traditions. Constantly studying the history and evolution of functional forms he attempts to imbue each functional piece with a conceptual understanding of history relating to food and it’s vessels. Davidoff’s exhibition practice revolves around the vessel, exploring contemporary memento mori and vanitas. Harnessing the ceramic vessel, itself a material constant, the works interrogate our contemporary relationship with the end while investigating the tension between an objects’ high art cultural value and its social value as a utilitarian object. Ultimately presenting vessels that have evolved from docile decorative ware to objects of ominous intent.

• 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

• Bridget Nicholson

  Bridget Nicholson

  Bridget is a Melbourne-based visual artist, with a background in architecture, urban design, sculpture, and an overlay of community cultural development. The impetus for this journey was provided by a childhood experience that created the need to question my own identity and connection to 'place' in an effort to acquire a sense of belonging. Most recently this quest has best been served by developing arts projects that enable me to delve into these questions through interactions with others; people and places. Multi media conceptual installations provide a framework for reviewing and re-presenting the experiences and material collected. Work starts with finding a material that is embedded in the conceptual thinking, within the parameters of place it has always resulted in organic materials and often clay. The body has become in effect the tool and the means engagement. Current work on threatened species has taken as a starting point the egg. Clay again seems the natural choice and together they are the focus of my paper and workshops. Clay: Affect and Effect will look at the way in which clay has played an active role developing works both conceptually and physically. Workshops will follow to enable a playing out of ideas. Bridget has exhibited in regional galleries and non ‘art’ spaces, she has presented at a number of conferences including Performance Climates Psi#22, and Land Dialogues and been published in Garland online magazine, The Journal of Australian Ceramics and Ceramics Technical. Portrait: Helga Leunig

• Claire Johnson

  Claire Johnson

  Claire Johnson is an Australian ceramic artist and painter based in Port Macquarie on NSW mid north coast. Claire completed her Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in ceramics at UNSW Art and Design at the end of 2014. Her work pays homage to ideas of mythology, love, the role of the muse, stories of personal experience and the notion of the ‘artists hand’ in her gestural forms and brushstrokes. Claire’s practice also embodies the belief that art can assist in the treatment of mental illness, something she discovered herself as a mental health patient in art therapy. ‘Art and mental health are intrinsically linked for me. A visual log and self portrait of a woman who is still finding herself, and a woman who is grateful for her hands that create all she cannot say. My heart on paper, and in sculpture’.

• 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

• Dr Damon Moon

  Dr Damon Moon

  Dr. Damon Moon is currently Creative Director of the ceramics studio at JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design in Adelaide, South Australia and an Adjunct Researcher in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Tasmania. His role at the JamFactory encompasses the design and production of tableware as part of the JamFactory product range and bespoke commissions for private and corporate clients, as well as mentoring up to six trainees who are undertaking the two-year JamFactory associate training program. Damon Moon is also one of Australia’s most prolific commentators on contemporary and historic ceramics, with over fifty published articles, catalogue essays and he has contributed to several major publications, including co-authoring the 2014 SALA monograph ‘Beyond Bravura’ on Stephen Bowers for Wakefield Press. Damon’s own practice as a maker sees him straddle the worlds of art, craft and design. In 2018 he is showing work in Milan as part of the 5 Vie ART + DESIGN WEEK series during the Milan Design Fair, and is exhibiting his own work in response to the collections of Shepparton Art Museum, Bendigo Art Gallery and the La Trobe Art Institute. In May 2019 Damon is curating ‘Manifest’, the Australian Ceramics Association biennial exhibition as part of Holding Space/Making Place, the 2019 Australian Ceramics Triennale in Hobart, Tasmania. click here to go to Damon’s website

• Eloise Rankine

  Eloise Rankine

  I am based in Sydney where I make, sell and exhibit ceramics. I run elph store in Paddington NSW, make elph ceramics, and exhibit artworks through Utopia Art Sydney. I also teach beginner’s throwing at Kil.n.it experimental ceramics studio, Glebe. I found my love of ceramics while studying fine arts at National Art School and since graduating I have exhibited in group shows at both commercial and regional galleries as well as being a finalist in a range of art prizes. I am currently just about to complete a Masters of Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. My preferred method of making is throwing, carving and altering porcelain, sometimes playing around with stains and other clays, but I do dabble in hand building sometimes! I work predominately in stoneware but have recently been enjoying using midfire porcelains.

• Kirsha Kaechele

  Kirsha Kaechele

  Kirsha Kaechele is an artist and curator drawn to the space where complex problems exist. Problems, for Kirsha, are simply a mechanism for art. Kirsha’s projects include: 24 Carrot Gardens, which creates kitchen gardens for schools in disadvantaged parts of Tasmania and New Orleans; Heavy Metal, an art-science project focused on cleaning up the River Derwent; Zero-Trash / Trascism, Mona's zero-waste approach (tested at the Mona Market over the last few years and embraced by Mona’s hospitality and festival teams); the Hacking School in New Orleans, a strictly non-dorky community learning space; Eat the Problem, a creative cooking solution to the problem of invasive species; as well as, of course, regular art feasts. click here to go to Kirsha’s portal Image courtesy MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia Photo Credit: RémiChauvin

• Mal Meiers

  Mal Meiers

  Mal Meiers is a chef, a ceramicist and founder of mental health awareness initiative Food for Thought. Mal has crafted his experience all around Australia and the world working at high end restaurants and most recently completing a 9 month tour Europe and Japan with pop up restaurant concept Food + Wine. After stints at Bennelong in the Opera House and Hobart's acclaimed Franklin, Mal has now settled into a Head chef position at Subo, Newcastle where his ceramics are designed and inspired by the local area and for the dishes that make up the offering. Portrait: Jana Langhorst

• Penny Evans

  Penny Evans

  I am an artist and independent business person. I create ceramics, works on paper, prints and film. I stay true to my creative process. My work is informed by my rich cultural heritage – Gomeroi/Gamilaraay – and connection to country is vitally important to me. Design work on my ceramics engage with the ancient symbols and iconography of my Ancestors with the underlying intent of reinstating ownership of something which was forcibly taken from us. I have been very busy in 2018: a solo show of my ceramic work at the Lismore Regional Gallery was installed throughout April.  Measured Response, a group show at the National Art School curated by Emily McDaniel, features a large wall installation of my ceramics. Also my ceramic design work will feature on the eastern sails of the Sydney Opera House as part of Badu Gili for NAIDOC in July 2018 My current work explores the devastating impact of water mismanagement and regressive European agricultural practices which are destroying our environment and are particularly acute in my Ancestral homelands. This investigation has resulted in a substantial body of ceramic work to be installed at the Shepparton Art Museum for the Indigenous Ceramic Art Award August 2018. click here to go to Penny's website Photographer - portrait: Neshko Garch

• Peter Timms

  Peter Timms

  Peter Timms was born and educated in Melbourne and currently lives in Hobart. He was Director of the Shepparton Art Gallery from 1973 to 1980, where he established the collection of Australian ceramics. In the early eighties, he was Assistant Curator of the Hyde Parks Barracks Museum of Australian Decorative Arts in Sydney. He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1984 to study studio ceramics in Europe and England, and an Australia Council Senior Writers’ Fellowship in 1994. In the early nineties, he travelled extensively in Japan, visiting potters and traditional pottery villages. Since 1988 he has worked as a freelance journalist and author, contributing to publications both within Australia and overseas. He was Editor of Art Monthly Australia for five years and has served as art critic for The Ageand The Australian newspapers. Peter has published eleven books of non-fiction, including Australian Studio Pottery, Making Nature,What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art?Australia’s Quarter Acre, Private Lives: Australians at Home since Federation and Hobart. His first novel, Asking for Trouble, was published by HarperCollins in 2014. His most recent book is A Serious History of Silliness. click here to go to Peter’s website

• 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"