Warrandyte Pottery Gallery Exhibition
Concurrence
Presented by Warrandyte Pottery
as part of the Craft Victoria: Craft Contemporary
Concurrence consists of six female-identifying ceramic artists coming together to inquire what informs their individual practice within the context of a community.
An important aspect of this project is the coming together to share and reflect on what role the individual maker plays in a group context and how their unique voices, perspectives and skill sets can contribute towards a thriving creative community.
Each artist has explored their own processes, reflecting on their values and what drives their practices. This culminated in a symbolic communal pit firing on the grounds of the original Potter’s Cottage in Warrandyte.
Inspiration for this project has in part come from the group of five potter’s; Reg Preston, Phyllis Dunn, Artec Halpern, Gus McLaren and Charles Wilton (three other members joining in 1961 were Sylvia Halpern, Elsa Ardern and Kate Janeba) who came together in 1958 to set up ‘Potters’ Cottage’; a communal space to come together to support each other as artists, and sell their handmade wares to the public.
Potter’s Cottage went on to become an institution, a few years later moving to a six acre block on Jumping Creek road, where they built a gallery, pottery school and restaurant, with all of the food being served on handmade pottery.
This group of artists were instrumental in shaping studio pottery in Australia – influencing a broader public’s taste for handmade, local pottery. This exhibition pays tribute to the community of potters that came before us, and emphasises the importance of the communal aspects within ceramic practice.
Wood for this project has been sustainably sourced and the group will gather post firing to plant native trees in the area to offset carbon emissions.
Artists
Claire Ellis
Emily Brookfield
Gabriela Mello
Yen Qin
Kristin Olds
Liljana Cerilles
Film and Photography
Tim McCartney
Moonstone Photography
Special Thank You to:
Rob Briggs, Drew Chisholm and Stephanie Coad without whom this Exhibition would not be possible.
To Catherine and Anthony Bullard who generously provided us with a beautiful and special location for our pitfiring.
To Hops & Vine for their support and generous donations towards this exhibition.
About our carbon neutral pit firing
Pit firing is the oldest known method for the firing of pottery. For thousands of years humans were not concerned with the carbon emissions from burning fuel. Fast forward to today, it is a very different story where no scientific body of national or international standing disagrees that global warming is caused by human activities and that radical change is necessary to survive.
With this in mind, it was important to us to quantify and offset the emissions from our communal firing. We weighed all of the recycled wood, sawdust and fallen wood used in our pit firing which was a total of 415kg.
Burning 1kg of wood generates 1.65 to 1.8 kg of CO2 which means that our firing generated 747kg of CO2 (¾ of a tonne). In high rainfall zones with good soil, it may take 3-5 trees over 25 years to sequester 1 tonne of CO2. In lower rainfall zones with poorer soil it could take as many as 15 trees.
It has been our decision overcompensate for the emissions we produced by committing to plant twenty native trees in the area following this exhibition.
If you would like to support the group in funding trees, please consider donating below.
Claire Ellis
Catch and Release and Carbon Cycle are wheel thrown and pit fired ceramic containers decorated with smoke and flashings from the elements present in various food and kitchen waste. Their recycled plastic lids are made of clay bags. Claire’s chef experience influences her work through a focus on raw materials and experimentation. Her research focuses on incorporating transformed studio and restaurant waste materials into her work which is inspired by her interest in sustainability, climate justice and catharsis.
Emily Brookfield
Emily Brookfield is a ceramic artist based in Lilydale on Woiwurrung territory. Emily’s work is informed by material exploration and an investigation of object interaction to create a sense of place. Our innate need to attach meaning and sentimentality to objects continues to fascinate Emily and the connection of community through clay drives her practice. The use of shells in her saggars and the forms thrown are a gentle nod to previous themes explored by the artist. The volatile and unpredictable nature of the pit firing is not dissimilar to the unpredictable events in our lives that shape who we are as individuals. It is a reminder to go with the ebbs and flows and resist the temptation to remain the same.
Gabriela Mello
Gabriela Mello (she/her) is a Latina ceramic artist living and working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. Her work is informed by her values, culture and heritage. Raised as an immigrant in New York City as well as on a rural Farm in Northern Brazil, Gabie’s work has a variety of techniques brought forward from her diverse upbringing. Her work is created through emergent and reflexive practices and informed by the edges she meets in her daily life as a human being living in our complex world. In her practice she gives permission to break the rules to explore the boundless and irrational limits of clay.
Each piece Gabie has created is unique, textural, and involves a deep conversation with this modality. The reciprocal relationship between herself and clay in the cocreation of material and making allows for distinct ceramic forms to emerge. The process of pit firing offers endless possibilities and the works seem to be created by nature itself; by the organic material and the fire which transforms the surface and further adds to the cocreation of each piece.
Gabie’s works were fired in foil saggars with food waste collected which have direct links to her Brazilian heritage. Coffee grounds, banana peels, corn husks, egg shells, sea shells, seaweed and salt were used alongside Copper Carbonate and Cobalt Carbonate to reflect the red earth and blue lake from her hometown.
Yen Qin
Yen Qin is the ceramics practice of Georgina Yen Qin Lee, a ceramicist living and working in Naarm. For Concurrence, she has made a series of vases that have been manipulated from traditional Chinese ceramic forms and pit fired amongst cultural objects and food items that represent moments that brought her family and communities together.
"Healing Chinese medicinal herbal chicken soups represent the love and care shown between different generations. It's what our grandmothers and mothers cook for us, and what we cook for them when we are older and looking after them. Similarly, funerary joss paper was a means of communicating with our ancestors. Families ritually burn these in a pit to send wealth and auspicious energy into the afterlife. I also used ingredients such as pandan, rice, dried shrimp, shredded coconut, jasmine tea and lotus leaf. Not only are these used in ceremonial desserts and dishes, it's our culture that we never eat alone or with a single solo dish. Things are always shared amongst many and every meal is a moment to bring people together."
Georgina uses the medium of ceramics to explore her personal experience as an Australian-born Chinese Malaysian, where feelings of both shame and reverence for her culture permeate through her work. Her practice has been a source of healing not only for herself but also a community of others who have grown up in migrant families seeking to establish, survive and thrive in a Western society.
kristin olds
Kristin Olds is a ceramic artist living, learning and creating on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. Kristin’s practice is informed by a desire to craft ritualistic pieces that invite people to take time in their day to slow down, connect to their senses and feel grounded in their bodies. Kristin feels endlessly inspired by the natural world surrounding her, and loves that her practice is a daily invitation to connect deeply with the earth and the elements.
For this exhibition, Kristin has created a range of functional ceramic wares, using hand-processed local clay, collected near her home in North Warrandyte. This clay was collected from drainage works on her street, which had been originally destined for the tip. Kristin has used a combination of wheel throwing and hand building techniques to slowly craft her pieces, before burnishing the surfaces with a smooth pebble.
For the pit firing, Kristin chose to wrap her pieces in waste steel wool, corn husks, oyster shells, hair, egg shells, seaweed, coffee grinds, wattle pods and eucalyptus leaves, before polishing her pieces with coconut oil. The materials used symbolise Kristin’s values of working with natural and recycled materials.
Liljana Cerilles
Quite simply, ceramics is the medium through which Liljana Cerilles, of Kokoro Clay, explores an obsession with the psychology of shapes; how a perceived form, through its visual appearance, texture and weight can inform and transform an experience and ground one in a physical moment. Though inspired by traditional Filipino cooking wares and vessels for food and water storage, the works created for Concurrence are recollective of shapes that appear in the history of many cultures and have become synonymous with nurture and nourishment, sharing and survival, comfort, community and family. Vessels such as these have been present through the mundane, the extreme and the most joyous occasions, earth forged with water and fire destined to return to them again and again by the hands of generations. Through this language of form, and through the utility of ceramic ware and its power to represent and evoke feeling, Liljana hopes to continue this history of connecting people to moments and to each other.
Decorative vessels are inspired by the Filipino ittoyom, oppaya and immosso (Kalinga), tapayan and palayok (Tagalog).
