We Came with Visions but not with Sight

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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Overview

We Came with Visions but not with Sight, 2024

Part of Facts of Matter, Clay Matters
Linden New Art Gallery Project Space
23 February – 24 March 2024
Curated by Cinda Manins

Presented in partnership with CLIMARTE as part of the 2024 National Sustainable Living Festival.

Listen to a conversation about this work on the Tales of a Red Clay Rambler podcast with Ben Carter, Claire Ellis and Jane Sawyer.

Watch video of my artist talk.

This series was made in collaboration with the elements,waiting for clouds to pass, wind to settle, to record shadows cast by native trees along the Merri Creek onto terracotta from South Australia. The surface is shaped by water etching and burnishing, techniques that let the landscape speak through the clay rather than imposing form upon it.

The title draws from Wendell Berry: "We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired." Working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country as a white American, I wanted to make work that had a documented, accountable relationship to Country, not a romanticised one.

The modern ceramics industry is deeply globalised, relying on mined materials sourced worldwide. This work deliberately uses materials sourced entirely within the Australian landscape, as one small act of paying attention to where things come from and what that means.

Installation shots of the Facts of Matter exhibition at Linden New Art Project Space by Tina Wilkins Pictures