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.
Can I Make Ceramics Out of That? A History of Practice in the Post-Industrial Landscape
Journal of Australian Ceramics, Vol 64, No 3, 2025A history of ceramicists working with what is close to hand — from Frances Senska's $300 pottery department in Montana, to Ivan McMeekin's material research in postwar Australia, to the growing movement of contemporary makers working with industrial waste streams and post-humanist thinking about materials as collaborators rather than inert substances.
"To source one's own materials today is not a retreat into nostalgia but an act of adaptation and stewardship. Ceramics becomes not just a craft, but a tool for re-imagining our relationship with the earth, training our hands and minds to shape futures from what has been left behind."
DOWNLOAD PDF