Cracked Bowl 4, 2024

The beautiful, bold colours and designs of transferware have captivated generations of ceramic admirers. Collectors and families have cherished sets of transferware cups and dishes. Familiar colours and patterns relay prestige or evoke feelings of nostalgia but transferware is fragile and in the slip of the hand a cherished piece can be cracked and flawed. Every crack is unique and takes its own path as it runs along a cup or a bowl, it marks the piece as different and not like the other cups in the cupboard. A cracked transferware cup has left its mass-produced perfection behind and become something else. It is no longer one of many identical cups, but an individual marked as unique by its flaw. My work utilizes the mass-produced patterns of transferware. I honor the bright colours and designs of transferware and appreciate transferware’s role in allowing people to decorate their homes and dinner tables. My transferware has cracks and flaws, their blemishes celebrate faults and damage as a mark of difference and individuality. I am looking for the beauty in broken things.

My life has taught me that some passions never die. I have always created things whether it was with pencils, clay or fabrics I was born with the need to make objects, so the first part of my adult life was spent in an Art School. I majored in textiles before going on to studying art theory and finally sculpture. I was well into a Masters of sculpture when I realized I felt lost.

So, I leapt out of my comfort zone and completed a nursing degree before traveling and nursing around Western Queensland. This fantastic experience exposed me to communities and people I had never imagined. I learnt about compassion, caring and diversity.

Then in 2020 I found myself nursing on a COVID ward. To relieve the stress and isolation of long shifts in multiple layers of PPE I joined my local pottery club. As soon as I got my hands back in clay I realized that making was a passion that will never leave me. Creating objects out of mud feels like a home coming and now I obsessively think, draw, dream and make ceramics. Molding my ideas into pots is a wonderful thing to do because as any potter will tell you turning mud into ceramics is a special kind of magic.