Joining Hiroe Swen, six contemporary artists, Annie Parnell, Lea Durie, Mahala Hill, Nathan Nhan, Isabelle Mackay-Sim and Cathy Zhang each create a group of ceramic vessels that can display flowers but challenge the idea of a vase. Sachie Terasaki, a skilled Ikebana artist and instructor will make Ikebana arrangements in direct response to the ceramic works.
Part of Craft + Design Canberra Festival, and responding to this year’s theme of Regenerate, this is a unique opportunity to see these two ancient practices in a new way and to purchase works from local artists.
Opening Hours | Monday to Friday 10am – 4pm | Saturday and Sunday 12pm – 4pm | Closed some public holidays
Entry to this exhibition is free | No bookings required
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Annie Parnell (b. 1996) lives and works on unseeded Gadigal Land. They are a graduate of the Australian National University School of Art and Design (Bachelor of Visual Arts, honours) in the Ceramics and the Sculpture and Spatial Practice Workshops. In 2019, their work was included in Talente, an international craft award from the Handwerskammer Munich. Their first solo show was at Strathnairn Arts in 2021. Parnell’s work is held in a number of private collections locally and internationally. Parnell's critical craft practice centres on experimentation, embodiment and community learning.
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Lea is a Braidwood based artist working primarily in ceramics. Working with clay for over 20 year Lea uses this malleable material to create forms that investigate human impact on the landscape. Lea works with both wild and commercial clays and manipulates surfaces with slips, sgrafitto, glaze and printing.
Lea Is currently completing a Masters of Contemporary Art Practices at the ANU School of Art and Design. She has been the recipient of a highly commended award in the national Klytie Pate Ceramics Award 2023, the 3D award at the QPRC Art Prize, the Doug Alexander Award 2021 from the Canberra Potters’ Society the Craft ACT Emerging Contemporaries Award with Craft ACT. In 2023 Lea was also awarded the Belconnen Art Centre Exhibition Award, Craft and Design Canberra Award and the Materials Award in the ANU School of Art and Design Graduating Exhibition EASS awards. Her work has been included in a number of group shows in the ACT, Victoria and NSW.
Lea is also a creative business owner, with her functional ceramics practice Mud Dept. producing carefully designed and crafted reduction fired tableware.
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Mahala Hill is a contemporary ceramic artist based in regional NSW, striving to push both the limits and the pre-conceived notions of her medium. Hill’s practice is discursive in nature, material exploration leads to ideas, extends her conceptual intent and brings to the foreground further questions or conundrums for exploration. Recently Mahala has been exploring curiosity, wonder, beauty, death, the apocalypse and how by using these motifs she can raise awareness of pressing environmental issues.
Hill’s practice has been centred around the process of the ‘burn out’. A ‘burn out’ is the remnant shell-like form that emerges from inside a layer of liquid clay after the combustible organic plant material has incinerated. The residual matter is a ghostly, shell-like phantom form or ‘burnt out’ spectre, simultaneously evoking traces of a life and a loss. This process of directly creating a brittle clay form from transformed organic matter is a crucial element underpinning Hill’s exploration of what has happened and what is currently happening to the environment.
Mahala has exhibited widely within Australia in both group and solo settings. Her work is held in several public collections including City of Townsville Art Collection, Macquarie Group Collection, The ACT Legislative Assembly Art Collection and private collections within Australia and Singapore.
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Nathan Nhan is a ceramicist whose practice uses experimental making and the ceramic process as a tool to create, investigate and manifest identities within his work. Responding to the inherent materiality and cultural significance of ceramics, Nhan reflects upon concepts of place, community and identity from an Asian Australian perspective. He often employs traditional vessels as a foundation, transforming historical forms into contemporary vehicles that play with the medium’s enduring epic narrative of both Eastern and Western perspectives imbued with personal stories and social commentary.
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Isabelle Mackay-Sim is a ceramic artist working on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra. Mackay-Sim’s practice centres the figure, exploring permutations of the body and its diverse relationships with the world at large.
Mackay-Sim has an experimental ceramic practice and is fascinated by the nuanced meanings that materials and processes bring to her work.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies in Australia and Internationally, receiving the Talente 2020 award and being featured in the Joya Barcelona art fair.
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Cathy Zhang is an artist, ceramicist, sculptor, and jewellery maker. She sculpts forms which oscillate at the edge of the functional and the speculative, taking cues from vessels and the human, environmental, and technological bodies behind their creation. Zhang graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design and is the recipient of multiple awards. She established her commercial project The Good Creation in 2016, drawing on her background in graphic design and her award-winning fabrication skills in metal and clay. Graduating in 2019, Zhang has exhibited in several group and solo shows including Negative Space at CCAS Manuka and Some-Thing at GAFFA in Sydney. She recently received the emerging artist award for her work in the Canberra Potters Society Members Exhibition 2020. Her work is held in the ANU Art Collection.
Image credit: Sachie Terasaki | Ikebana | Image courtesy of the artist