Claire Vaganience
Claire is a contemporary jeweller based in Naarm. Formally trained in gold and silversmithing and fold forming, she had a lifelong love of jewellery (making and collecting), she is interested in capturing shapes, forms and textures from the natural environment and integrating them into her designs. Additionally, Claire likes to incorporate spiritual iconography and mythology into protective amulets and statement pieces. She is passionate about sharing jewellery making techniques and runs jewellery making workshops designed for those who have no jewellery making experience. Claire believes that everyone has the skills and creativity to make jewellery, and is her goal to facilitate transforming people’s individual creativity into their own unique pieces of wearable art.
Georgina Proud
Georgina Proud is a ceramic artist who places a focus on materiality, creating experimental ceramic vessels with inclusions of glass and other found materials. Her work investigates how these materials react to the ceramic and firing processes. She works primarily with wheel-thrown forms exploring methods of collage and assemblage to create distinct sculptural vessels. She enjoys playing with the tension between the functional and sculptural, making work that blurs the lines between the two. Her work explores the themes of femininity, fragility and strength through bold curves and textured surfaces that are at once both soft and robust.
Helena Sinclair
Helena Sinclair is a practicing Melbourne and Sydney artist who studied at Hornsby Tafe and RMIT University. She investigates concepts rooted in perception and psychology, often exploring where we draw the line between our yucks and our yums. She likes to create sculptures that question things like: what do we perceive as waste or what do we perceive as functional? Why do we accept specific social ideals of beauty? Why do we still have gender roles in modern society? Her Honors year was spent finding out why the things that we grow on our body (teeth, nails, hair) are cared for so meticulously and celebrated only when they are on the body, and become repulsive as soon as they are detached. She uses materials such as clay, metal, paper, bodily matter and found objects to explore her inner ponderings and help generate understanding of the ever so complex world around her.
Jessie Balletta
Jessie Balletta is a Melbourne-based painter and printmaker specialising in etching. With a Bachelor of Fine Art in Print Imaging Practice from RMIT University and an Advanced Diploma of Visual Art from the same institution, Jessie has developed a distinctive voice in the contemporary art scene, exploring abstract and existential themes through their practice. Jessie’s work is characterised by a meditative approach to abstraction, engaging deeply with the interplay of light and darkness, internal revelations, and ritualistic motifs. This exploration has been showcased in various exhibitions, including solo presentations such as Square Optics at No Vacancy Gallery (2022) and group shows like Emerge: 10th Edition at Brunswick Street Gallery (2022) and Crossing Paths at Australian Print Workshop (2020). Notable achievements include being a finalist in the Darebin A1 Art Prize (2020) and winning the Collie Trust Scholarship for Emerging Victorian Printmakers (2018). Jessie has also participated in significant artist residencies, such as Pig Prints in Milan, Italy (2023) and the Brashnar Creative Project in Skopje, North Macedonia (2019). In addition to their creative practice, Jessie is dedicated to sharing their knowledge through teaching and public speaking. She has been a guest speaker at Northcote High School, Caroline Chisholm Catholic College, and Thomastown High School, and currently works as an Art Technician at Haileybury College, contributing to the local art education community.
Connect with Jessie via social media:
IG: jessie_balletta
Jess Lyons
Jess Lyons is a ceramic artist based in naarm/ Melbourne. Her research and artistic practice weaves together material application and surface treatments on slab-built and extruded sculptural forms. Searching for abyssal self-identity through internal reflection, Jess excavates a physical landscape of fragility, growth and resilience. She engages in a ‘brinkmanship’, pushing and testing both the boundaries and limits of materials whilst interrogating her own personal landscape. Using art as a tool and marker of time and progress, Jess explores the mutability and interchangeable readings of ceramic materials – creating a process that offers a parallel narrative that mirrors the self’s journey. Via repetition, testing, journaling and research, Jess is motivated by the newness of contemporary approaches to traditional ways of making and crafting.
Karima Baadilla
Karima works through the perspective of an Indonesian migrant settler in Australia, delving into the complexities of histories across two countries and its impact on her shifting Indonesian-Australian identity. She seeks to find and suggest ways of redefining a continuously evolving diasporic identity through her studio practice, which involves found objects and adaptable installations that spotlight the fragmented aspects of her identity. Karima recently completed her Honours in Fine Art at La Trobe University, where she earned an Outstanding Achievement Award. In 2024, she was commissioned by the City of Ballarat for Craft Lab 2024. Some of her recent highlights include being a finalist in the 2022 Paddington Art Prize and the inaugural Regional Landscape Prize. In 2022, Karima had her first solo exhibition at Footscray Arts Centre (VIC), following their ‘RESIDENCE’ program, which she was selected for in late 2021. In 2021, she won the Mark Brabham Emerging Artist Award at the Klytie Pate Ceramics Awards. In 2020, she was a finalist in several prestigious art prizes, including the Bayside Acquisitive Prize (VIC), Stanthorpe Art Prize (QLD), Muswellbrook Art Prize (NSW), and Collie Art Prize (WA). That year, she also received the Maribyrnong Rapid Grant from the City of Maribyrnong (VIC) and the Sidney Myer Grant from The Myer Foundation. Karima’s work has also been exhibited by commercial galleries like Boom Gallery and Michael Reid Northern Beaches.
Kristin Burgham
Kristin Burgham is a Melbourne based ceramic artist working with industrial ceramic production processes and found objects. Her constructed ceramic assemblages reveal the legacy of unknown makers. Her works reveal process, practice and production by tracing making lines to expose the act of production and make the invisible visible. She explores the notion of time and the trajectory of skills. Her process starts with complex mould making and results in constructed porcelain clay imbued with colour and memory. Burgham has a studio in South Melbourne. Her works are in the public collections of the NGV, Ballarat Art Gallery, Shepparton Art Museum and Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery.
Lauren Cameron
Lauren Cameron (She/They) is a ceramic-based artist working on the land of Naarm (Melbourne). Her work is centered around the themes of trauma, assault, and petty emotions. Using clay and glaze, she embarks on an artistic adventure to showcase these feelings and experiences. Lauren’s art is a deeply personal and evocative exploration of her inner world, reflecting the complexities of her emotional landscape. Through her ceramics, she seeks to express the raw and often unspoken aspects of human experience, translating them into tangible forms that invite viewers to engage with their own emotions. Her pieces often feature intricate designs and textures, which serve to highlight the delicate balance between fragility and resilience. By manipulating the clay, Lauren captures the essence of vulnerability and strength, creating works that resonate on both a personal and universal level. In addition to her thematic focus, Lauren is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of traditional ceramics. She experiments with various techniques and materials, continually evolving her practice to incorporate new elements and ideas. This innovative approach not only enhances the visual impact of her work but also deepens its emotional resonance. Through her work, Lauren aims to foster a greater understanding and empathy for those who have experienced trauma and assault, offering a space for reflection and healing.
Leanne Marshall
Drawn from ceramics-based processes, Leanne’s creative practice forms via symbiotic material relationships as an exploration of the free space of transition outside of notions of containment, restraint, and inhibition.
In the reinterpretation of traditional ceramic techniques, Leanne’s practice is focused on regenerating material memory and narrative through a process of partial destruction that occurs in a high-firing kiln. Reflecting on cycles of rebirth, decay, kinship and resilience as embodied female experiences, Leanne creates works that are devised as a type of co-occupation, as an inter-mingling and fusing of material elements composing a narrative. Leanne’s creative research is driven by experimentation into material traces. The energy of the kiln generates unexpected material relationships. In the sensory engagement of dripping, melting, slumping, tearing, fusing, folding, and fluxing of glass, steel, porcelain, glaze and organic forms, Leanne’s practice aims to generate colours, surfaces and forms comprised of traces and remnants of memory, kinship, lore and identity. Through a continuous cycle of material destruction and regeneration, Leanne’s work investigates personal narratives along with interrogations into the decorative arts as a feminist space. Through the distortion and the re-imagining of the ornament and the decorative in craft traditions, Leanne’s work reinterprets ceramic practices, as well as paradigms of the ‘feminine’ motherhood and the domestic space to locate understandings that live in the underbelly of life in the female body.
Lucy Tolan
Lucy Tolan (she/her) is a queer ceramics artist based in Naarm. Having completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2018, she utilises a combination of pinch and slab-building techniques to negotiate concerns of tension and harmony within her pieces. Through bold juxtaposition of form, colour and texture, Tolan’s work catalyses the generative power of aesthetic contradiction. Her style draws from diverse sources of inspiration – including modernist architecture, textiles and the natural world – to produce romantic encounters between fragility and boldness within each creation. Tolan’s work has been exhibited by galleries such as Craft Victoria and Modern Times. She has been featured in The Design Files, and was chosen as one of Craft Victoria’s 2020 Virtual Makers in Residence. In 2021, she was selected as a finalist for the ‘Handcrafted’ Prize in the Design Files + Laminex Awards.
Madeleine Thornton-Smith
Madeleine Thornton-Smith is a painter and ceramic artist from Melbourne. Madeleine’s practice examines the hierarchy that exists between fine art and craft in relation to class and gender, with a particular interest in subverting meaning through remediation. Employing a slow process of accumulation and repetition, she uses slip-casting to bring together commonplace studio material surfaces and textures with archetypal forms from fine art and ceramics – such as vessels, plinths, frames and canvases. This mimetic process raises questions about the status and value of ceramics, art and craft. She is also interested in exploring memory and nostalgia through casting. She has completed tertiary studies in painting, ceramics, English and languages. In 2017 she graduated with First Class Honours in ceramics at RMIT. Madeleine has a particular interest in labour issues, particularly in relation to the visual arts and ceramics industries, and has written and presented for various publications and educational, media, union and industry bodies. Madeleine has over a decade’s experience working as a carer and in community arts education and teaches ceramics to young people, children and adults with disability. Madeleine has undertaken several local and international art residencies and has exhibited in various artist-run, private and publicly funded galleries throughout Melbourne.
Mali Taylor
Mali Taylor is a Melbourne based ceramic artist currently exploring the parameters of coil methodology within her practice. Born in the Northern Rivers of NSW, Mali spent her childhood immersed in the beauties of the Australian landscape, which has undoubtedly influenced her practice. Mali’s sculptural works predominately investigate; the connection between ceramic process and the maker’s state of mind, the materialization of memories, and nature’s methods of time keeping and historical archiving of past events and environments. Through the methodical and meditative layering of earthy clay, Mali’s hand-built sculptures hold time, invoking memory of archaic Australian landscapes. Upon completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts specializing in object based practice at RMIT in 2019, Mali’s graduate body of work was selected as a finalist in Craft Victoria’s prestigious fresh! exhibition, which celebrates the best of Victoria’s graduating students within craft, design and fine art disciplines. Here, she was awarded with the Sofitel on Collins Prize, providing Mali with the opportunity to exhibit works in their exclusive gallery space. Mali was selected at a finalist in the Wyndham Art Prize 2020 and her work can be spotted in various stockists across Melbourne and has been featured in magazines such as The Design Files, Vogue Living, Belle Magazine and The Local Project.