Please tell us a little bit about yourself and what prompted you to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT? As a kid I attended a school that was really focused on the arts and from the youngest age I had a lot of enjoyment using clay. After graduating from Shearwater Steiner School in Mullumbimby, NSW, I moved to Melbourne and worked for the likes of Third Drawer Down and Lucy Folk Jewellery. While working for Lucy Folk I felt inspired again to pursue my own practice. I had an idea of what materials I wanted to work with so doing a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Ceramics allowed me to explore my full potential as I was lucky enough to have full access to studio and facilities like large kilns and work spaces. Your body of work in FRESH! is titled – An Offering to My Other Side. Could you talk more about the significance of the title? An Offering to My Other Side was made in homage to my Malukan ancestry and to the feeling of being proud of where I come from. Having a parent from a non-western place, I experienced feelings of isolation and difference to other families who embody a “normal” family life within white Australian culture. In my case, it took me up until I was a young adult to be proud of my cultural heritage and what that culture represented. I wanted to honour this cultural awakening by creating a body of work in homage to Maluku mythology. An Offering to My Other Side is intended to embody my own interpretation of Maluku culture and story through my own experience living here in
Bringing together coiling, slip casting and slab techniques to create the overall forms, the surface of the vessels are marked with symbols which pay homage to your Maluku Islands Heritage – could you talk more about bringing together all of these elements in your work? Coiling, moulded objects and slab building are the techniques I use to create what I call “building bricks”. It is not so much the moulded singular object that is of importance, it is the structure that results when the form is built by joining each building brick together, creating a whole. The symbols marked on the surfaces of the clay are made with my found objects, both natural and man-made. Mementos collected throughout my life. After looking at symbols, signs and patterns used in Maluku art, I thought that maybe I could use my found objects as my own set of carving tools, and symbol making tools that would illustrate my own interpretation of Malukan story. Your practice sees you working both with jewellery and ceramics – what is it that draws you to each medium and have you found that the techniques and processes of one has impacted the other and vice versa? I discovered metal objects and jewellery in my second year of my bachelor. I took Katherine Bowman’s casting class and after that, it felt natural to continue what I had learnt from her but in my own way. For me using wax to create metal objects felt really natural as wax has the same flexibility as clay. Australia, experiencing Maluku culture through my father. I have drawn on concepts and