Ruth Waller, Toni Warburton, Leah Bullen
Ruth Waller
In recent years my work has come to reflect the pleasures of gardening and daily walks in local bushland. I have gathered together and intersected vegetal elements with vase and urn shapes loosely derived from vessels from Ancient Greece and China. I’m interested in the interplay of motif and material surface, figure and ground, and tone and colour, and how this interplay creates ambiguous relations of shape, planarity and pictorial space.
Leah Bullen
‘Easily distracted by the weather’, is a series made in response to my suburban garden in Armidale. This small backyard plot is an open space allowing for maximum sun. The garden is organised in rows, a suburban ‘farm’ of cut flowers and veggies. The bordering fences, trees, rooflines and electrical wires frame an open patch of sky. My gaze from the house and studio is often drawn to this expanse. An aerial theatre for light phenomena and meteorological conditions – it is both constant and changeable.
Toni Warburton
For from a studio garden, I have composed a tablescape of ceramic containers and objects. They are informed by my research interests in the ceramic continuum and are imbued with gestures, colours, patterns and motifs that arise from my experience of a garden as a place of containment, contemplation and wonder. A mysterious female personage reclining in a striped dress appears in the work.
This assemblage of ceramic genres has been informed by my abiding interests in ways that images and stories manifest.
from everyday life, such as passenger sitings of black swans in field ponds when driving through the Highlands.
from literature, the mysterious Theodora Goodman, always dressed in stripes, from Patrick White’s Australian novel, the Aunt’s Story.
from art history: the exquisite Sleeping Lady, a reclining Neolithic terracotta figure from Hal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta,
sculptural plant motifs in Renaissance polychrome maiolica garlands in terracotta by the Della Robbia family,
conical shapes and turquoise glazes of Iranian 12th-century silhouette wares and terracotta press moulding as their means of production.