Galbu Ceramics

Australian Capital Territory

I first played with clay in 1998 and have been exploring its joys, opportunities and challenges ever since.

Over the years I have experimented in all sorts of areas; but there are recurrent patterns which tell stories of:

• clay itself and its marvellous characteristics
• the world I live in
• nature’s beauty, which inspires and intrigues me. I love light, colour and texture, especially in gum barks, rocks, corals

They are stories of passion, skill, risk-taking but also of many dead ends, failures, resignations. Above all, is the occasional flash of joy, enough to continue telling stories….

On a three-dimensional object I like to take the story right round the object so you can’t read it all at once. Some examples in the yunomi are the Croquet series, the graph, the geology of the Australian states, and the garden story based on a Paul Klee painting.

Another story is the way one life form builds on another, for support, or shelter, or food. The reef ecosystem is a wonderful example. I use texture created by embedding materials in the clay which burn out during firing, leaving remnants of their presence through the disrupted surface. This suggests critters living in over and under one another.