Finite

Participants

Alyssa Nuttall
Alyssa Nuttall is a ceramic artist based in Melbourne/Naarm. Raised in Western Australia, her practice has developed through a slow and deliberate engagement with the fragile environments that sustain life. Working with clay as both material and collaborator, she draws on its geological memory to reflect shifting Australian ecologies and the pressures shaping them, including drought, bushfire, coastal erosion and coral bleaching.Her forms emerge through carving, layering and reconstruction, guided by balance, weight and the material’s own limits. Soft asymmetry, carved strata and subtle shifts in structure allow each piece to sit between stability and fragility — resilience and collapse.Approached as quiet presences within everyday life, her vessels hold traces of ecological grief alongside endurance. Considered incomplete until encountered, each work invites attention, care and a closer awareness of environmental change in lived space.

Alterfact
Lucile Sciallano and Ben Landau (1985–2022) co-founded Alterfact Studio in 2014 with the goal of merging new technology and tradition through 3D-printed ceramics.Working with 3D clay printers that they have built and modified themselves, Alterfact Studio experiments with the possibilities of this contemporary technique. Their work explores the space between handmade and mass-manufactured form and the influence of digital technology on craft practice.Lucile and Ben met and trained at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, before moving to Australia together in 2013.Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of numerous private and museum collections.

Amelia Black
Born in 1983 in Virginia, United States, Amelia Black is a designer, researcher and ceramicist whose trajectory has been shaped by a long-term engagement with the world of designed objects.Black received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture & Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2001 to 2006.Relocating to New York City from 2008 to 2020, Amelia Black pursued a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in 2010, where they developed original research into the sensory experiences of physical objects and spaces, writing a thesis entitled ‘Design Smells: Odourous Rhetoric in Embodied Experience.’While in New York, Black also co-founded a community ceramics facility called Studio Ana with co-founder Aliza Simons.Since 2020, Amelia Black has established residence in Melbourne/Naarm, marking a significant shift in their creative focus. Here, they have undertaken a practice-based research approach to ceramic technology, delving into a scholarly exploration of clay and ceramic materials, with a focus on unravelling the intricacies of materials and historical craft technology.Black endeavours to unlock opportunities for responsible mineral-based artistic expression within the context of our current environmental crisis. This pursuit is guided by an understanding of material supply chains, a commitment to more sustainable studio practices and a vision for a more regenerative model of making.

Billy Crellin
Driven by patient devotion to material ecology, new materialism and material afterlife, Billy Crellin’s practice occupies a new plane built upon histories of glass making, studio crafts and industrialisation.Crellin’s sculptural works transform raw earthly commodities into consumer objects, following a linear anthropology that ultimately returns them to natural processes.In its deceptive clarity, glass mimics the metamorphosis of stone, embodying a uniquely human interpretation of natural evolution.A trained production glassblower with a degree in visual arts, Crellin has worked for over a decade across glass centres in Europe and Australia before establishing a studio in Melbourne/Naarm.Crellin’s works are found in the collection of the City of Lommel, and he has held residencies at the Glazenhuis in Belgium.

Blanche Tilden
Blanche Tilden has forged an international reputation practicing in both studio glass and contemporary jewellery since 1995.Exploring an enduring fascination with the material and metaphoric potential of glass, Tilden’s work prompts us to consider evolving relationships between humanity and technology, referencing modernism, industrial materials and objects and the built environment.In 2023, Blanche was awarded a PhD by ANU, researching uses of glass in combination with other materials to investigate an idea central to contemporary jewellery – which is value.Looking beyond traditional understandings of intrinsic value, this practice-based research explored cultural, historic, aesthetic and sentimental values relating to both glass and jewellery.Creative collaborations push Blanche’s multidisciplinary practice in new directions, combining handmaking, industrial and digital processes to make tangible and conceptual links between herself and the wearers and viewers of her work.

Eugenie Kawabata
Eugenie Kawabata is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist working from the Abbotsford Convent. Her sculptural practice transforms discarded textiles into materially complex works that explore ecology, transformation and permanence.Combining stitching, dyeing and binding with experimental resin processes, Kawabata creates forms that oscillate between abstraction and biological reference – artefacts that feel unearthed rather than made.She has exhibited widely, and her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, High House, Singapore and in private collections in Australia and overseas.

Franky Frankland
Franky Frankland (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist who graduated with a Master of Fine Art in 2014. Their practice merges hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramics and draws upon their background in painting and drawing.Franky’s current work focuses on the materiality of clay – treating it like paper by tearing, layering and assembling the vessels layer by layer.Through the application of coloured slips and textured surfaces, they investigate the potential of the unglazed ceramic surface.Thematically, their work delves into concepts of geological time, generational shifts and the vulnerability of being human, with an emphasis on LGBTIQA+ histories and narratives.Franky’s practice invites reflection on how personal and collective experience can embed itself in form and material.

Isabel Avendaño Hazbún
Isabel Avendaño Hazbún is an interdisciplinary designer/maker running a research-based studio focused on sustainability.Avendaño Hazbún is interested in how things are made and the stuff that things are made of.Through self-initiated projects, Avendaño Hazbún investigates materials and their properties and applies sustainable processes in the design and manufacture of rigorously made conceptual collections that have a cohesive visual language.Mainly working with excess and the discarded, with the intention to repurpose and considering the entire ecological impact of the object, Avendaño Hazbún’s work aims to use design to revise outdated manufacturing models, making sustainability the true measure of an object’s worth.

Jennifer Conroy-Smith
Jennifer Conroy-Smith is a British-born artist, lecturer and researcher based in Melbourne/Naarm, whose practice explores the interrelations between the body, memory and material through ceramic sculptural forms.Grounded in material thinking, her work focuses on experimental processes that combine porcelain with glass and metals.Central to her practice is a fascination with uncertainty, liminality and emergence – conditions through which materials and ideas evolve in dialogue with the unpredictable forces of gravity, time and flux.Her research investigates how exploratory methods in ceramic practice can articulate the mutable, relational and often unpredictable nature of lived experience.

Juan Castro
Juan Castro’s work is the result of the attraction and curiosity toward adornments that he has carried with him since childhood.His jewellery is created by a juxtaposition of religious adornments, old Mediterranean cultures and civilisations, history, antique treasures, mythology, an anthropologist’s definition of beauty, the Phi number, volcanic landscapes, movement, balance and the fragile line between beauty and destruction.The mixture of all of this, combined with the use of traditional techniques, makes each piece unique.

Mechelle Shooter
Mechelle Shooter (she/her) is an industrial designer based in Naarm (Melbourne) who is drawn to developing objects through the experimental use and manipulation of materials and processes.Driven by curiosity and a need to create, she seeks to explore new methods of making through the playful melding of craft, digital practices and technologies.Her designs range from lighting, ceramic objects and vessels to cast objects and furniture pieces.She strives to add value, meaning and connection through the materiality, craft and functionality of her designs.

Richard Greenacre
Richard Greenacre is an industrial designer based in Melbourne (Naarm-Birrarung-ga) whose work encompasses furniture, lighting and object design. His design approach is grounded in material experimentation and research and places emphasis on hands-on experience and the act of designing through making. Over the last decade, Richard has been increasingly focused on exploring the material possibilities of clay, creating work that dwells in the liminal space between industrial design and craft.