Amelia Black is a ceramic researcher, material artist and writer/facilitator based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, Naarm/Melbourne. Her practice centres material provenance, landscape as story, and the ethics of extraction. Her work seeks to relate with material and place to build accountability and relationality into the act of making.



Selected Work


Biography


This practice takes place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing relationship between Country, clay, making and storytelling.






Bulk Buy Pop-Up Shop & Exhibition, 2023

visit project website: Alternative Ceramic Supply

Testing Grounds Emporium, 432 Queen Street Naarm/Melbourne
25–28 October 2023
Part of Craft Contemporary 2023

Works from this project are held in the collection of the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, and are currently on view in Sustainable Ceramics #2: Investigating a Footprint (22 November 2025 – 25 October 2026).

Part exhibition, part interactive retail pop-up, Bulk Buy presented 10 second-life materials for use in ceramics, all reclaimed from industrial byproduct and waste streams, sourced locally, processed on a small scale, and available for purchase.

The project disrupted the standard take-make-waste economy of ceramics supply. Ceramicists were prompted to question their usual methods of sourcing raw ingredients and their position in the supply chain. Visitors were invited to imagine what the pottery supply shops of the future might look like. It generated real conversations and helped gauge interest for more materials and future events.

Alternative Ceramic Supply advocates for the custodianship of materials rather than ownership, empowering potters to look at materials in their immediate environment, including local urban waste streams. Environmental, cultural and social responsibility in pottery is at the core of what they do.

Alternative Ceramic Supply: Amelia Black, Claire Ellis, Georgia Stevenson and Sarah Muir-Smith.

Photography: Michael Pham, 2023.