Amelia Black
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.






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Grand Hotel, 2013
Vancouver Art Gallery / Hatje Cantz, 2013Archival researcher for Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life, an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and accompanying publication by Hatje Cantz charting the evolution of the hotel from isolated utilitarian structure to global cultural phenomenon.

Working with the archivist at the Waldorf Astoria and the New York Public Library, the research traced how the hotel developed its systems in the years following Black Friday. 

What emerged was a portrait of a remarkably sophisticated service infrastructure: a high-tech antenna system delivering radio to every room, a card catalogue recording every guest preference across every stay, a notification system allowing staff to flag an arriving guest from the front door through the entire building, and a hidden network of staff corridors and elevators that allowed service to move invisibly through the hotel.

What we found in those archives was effectively the source code for a grand hotel, a 1930s manual of procedure for making people feel known without ever revealing the machinery behind it.

Project team: Jer Thorp, Ben Rubin, Mark Hansen and Amelia Black.