Chinese series:

A trip to China last year,  visiting the ancient Dragon kilns (still in use) and pottery production villages and porcelain centres, influenced these works. But most particularly, a wall in the Shanghai Museum featuring a collection of ancient ethnic Chinese masks, which I sat and individually sketched were the foundation for many of the colourful ‘character’ stoneware pots.

Women Series sculptures based on drawings by Joy Hester:

The theme of these four ceramic sculptures approximately 40cm x 40cm, titled Women Series depicts various aspects of the lives of women and their emotional state.

I have been hugely influenced by the drawings of Australian artist Joy Hester for these sculptural images. She died at the age of 46 in 1961 and was one of the Melbourne Heidi School of artists supported by patrons Sunday and John Reed.

She worked with Sid Nolan, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, Charles Blackman, Mirka Mora, Arthur Boyd and lived with Englishman Guy Grey Smith in what we would regard as appalling penury and ill health. These artists collectively founded an Australian modernism, both in imagery, painterliness and emotive reaction to their times.

Hester, being a woman was the least acknowledged of the group in her short lifetime, but posthumously has been acclaimed for the brilliance of her art, personalised subject matter and female perspective. I felt she needed revisiting and the three-dimensional offered a different scale and characteristic.