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.
Materials: Dug clay, white stoneware, transparent glaze, iron-rich slip, terra sigillata
Dimensions: variable, seven works
Shown in Finite, Dowel Jones Showroom, Fitzroy, 8–17 May 2026. Curated by Lucille Sciallano (Alterfact) and Richard Greenacre, alongside Alyssa Nuttall, Billy Crellin, Blanche Tilden, Eugenie Kawabata, Franky Frankland, Ingrid Rhule, Isabel Avendaño Hazbún, Jennifer Conroy-Smith, Juan Castro, Mechelle Shooter, Nicholas Roder and Richard Greenacre.
Two buckets of it sat in my studio. The invitation of Finite was the occasion to process it. Sieving out rocks and organic matter, I worked with this material as a plastic clay, as slip, and as terra sigillata. There was a finite amount, and a limited window in which to get to know how it would respond to heat and to different ways of working. I had a finite supply to work with, and these pieces are the documentation of that research: a use of craft as a means of material inquiry.
Working with it has meant learning to listen to what it wants to do. The clay is highly plastic, with a very fine particle size. It shrinks dramatically and unpredictably. It ruptures under stress, sheds from surfaces it cannot bond with, moves in the kiln. In this work I have built forms that hold these behaviours rather than override them, pairing the iron-rich clay with white stoneware as a structural counterpart so that the agency of the dug clay has a voice.
If I had infinite time and material, I might have been tempted to override or coax the material into my own ideas of form; this exploration didn't allow me that power. The clay gave me a voice as well. It asked me to step out of the quiet control I have when throwing and into the sculpted: pushing the clay with my fingers, carving it with found objects. The cracks and fissures hold the rupture; the structural bases hold the work.
Photography: Kaede James Takamoto, 2026.