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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Strata, 2025

Material: Terracotta, Ball Clay, Red Iron Oxide
Dimensions: 227 x 297 x 5mm This carved wall piece laminates terracotta from the Adelaide Hills with ball clay from outside of Bendigo, two of the few sites where Australian potters can source local clay. These geologies, shaped over millennia in different landscapes, meet on one surface.

Shadows cast by the landscape near my studio in Naarm are recorded with iron oxide, then etched away to reveal the pale stoneware beneath. The work juxtaposes two timescales: the slow transformation of geological time that makes clay from stone and the ephemeral shadows that are constantly changing but also anchor the work to a specific moment in time and place on the earth.

The abstracted shadows invite viewers to find their own figures in the contrasting surfaces, connecting deep time to the intimacy of each moment of attention.


Image by the artist