Many pieces have come from the kiln through recent ceramic studio workshops including Lorraine Lintern’s coral-like earthenware ‘Fairy-Bowls’, and Ray Mollers lively & curious dogs, cats and horses.
There are colourful, exuberant paintings such as Christine O’Brien’s ‘Female Cat-Birds’ and cool and calming works by Jason Morning.
In The Solo Space, we have “Dirt Magick” a collaboration in clay by Ali Walker & Narelle Carlyle; where earth becomes art: through slow transformation with hands, water, time and fire.
From Ali Walker –
There is a quiet alchemy in the meeting of earth, water, and human touch. Dirt Magick is an exploration of that transformation — the way raw clay, gathered from creeks and valleys, carries the story of the land into form. Each vessel begins as wild clay, unearthed with care, crushed and sieved by hand, revealing its own voice and texture. In the rhythm of this process, the pounding, shaping, and firing, something ancient and meditative unfolds. Wild clay is full of wonders—stones, roots, memories of flood and fire.
Everything begins in the ground.
Clay under fingernails, ochres that whisper red and yellow, crumbled and cracked open by weather and time. To work with them is to collaborate with the wild; to surrender to what the land decides to give. There is alchemy here: mud to vessel, dust to light. But it is also something simpler, a way of returning…. Returning to earth
These works honour the origins of the materials themselves: humble, imperfect, and alive. They speak of cycles — of growth, decay, and renewal — themes also reflected in my Return to Earth series of funerary urns, born from the experience of loss and the reminder that all things return to where they began.
From Narelle Carlyle –
I invite you to pause and reflect on this deep connectedness, this sense of belonging, of beauty and awe. I feel blessed in my daily life as this is the energy which I aim to infuse into each piece I create.
Clay is dirt made magic by fire.
“Clay is the most ancient of all materials… It is the stuff of the earth itself, the dust from which we are formed and to which we return.” Edmund de Waal, The Pot Book
