Lauren Downton, Skeletendril, 2023, porcelain, 8 x 12 x 31cm, photo by James Field

Lauren Downton shares her journey from the dazzling nature of South Africa to the withered landscape of South Australia, from which has emerged hybrid porcelain forms.

I grew up on the dusty plains of a cattle farm in rural South Africa, surrounded by wide open landscapes with dramatic storm clouds and grasslands dotted with thorny acacia trees. Situated at the foot of the sprawling Winterberg mountains. It was an idyllic place for an inquisitive child to grow up, surrounded by nature. Encounters with wildlife were part of our everyday life. Hornbills, with yellow, banana-like beaks and dappled black and white plumage, were frequent visitors to our garden. Their arrival was always a spectacle, accompanied by the rhythmic chatter of hoopoe birds, crowned in spotted feathers and displaying brilliant shades of chestnut with intense black and white streaks.

A bit over an hour’s drive away was Hogsback, named for its three hog-like mountain peaks that form part of the Amathole Mountain Range. Hogsback is situated within a larger escarpment rising 1800 metres above sea level. It is a ruggedly beautiful region with mountainous grasslands and wildflowers meeting dense forests of yellowwood and Cape chestnut trees. The Hogsback forest is filled with leafy gullies, sheer waterfalls and winding streams that trickle through the woods. During family hiking trips to the Hogsback forest, I was mesmerised by such giant trees, with fuzzy lichen-covered trunks towering above us, leading my eyes far up to the canopies above, aglow in delicate sunlight. Walking through the forest floor was a sensory delight. Earthy scents of damp soil, moss and pine intermingled among dewy ferns. And the surprise of puffball mushrooms with bursting clouds of spores would make my sister and I shriek with horror and glee.

I live in Australia now. My family immigrated here when I was eleven years old, and we eventually settled in Adelaide. To this day, I still remember the moment when our plane first touched down at the airport. It was a scorching day in January; 40 degrees Celsius with hot winds and brown dust blowing across the runway, while the tarmac visibly baked under the searing sun. My first impression of Australia’s harsh, dry weather and seemingly withered gum trees was a far cry from the lush forests I had grown up with, but I have since grown to love this country’s distinct landscapes and beauty.

Nowadays, I call Highbury home. It’s a suburb nestled in the Adelaide foothills where urban life and nature intertwine. Perched on the side of a hill, our house is surrounded by native woodlands teeming with eucalyptus and acacia. There is a flurry of activity in our garden with kookaburras fighting over who gets the best gum branch, and lorikeets flickering hues of the rainbow while they feed on nectar from surrounding trees. Our house looks out across a valley with Black Hill and the greater Mount Lofty Ranges in the distance, the Torrens River winding its way below. This surrounding woodland is a haven for echidnas, koalas and kangaroos, which my husband and I often spot while walking our dogs through the nearby trails.

It is immensely satisfying to pour the velvety smooth liquid into the cavity of the mould, removing it later as a perfectly formed shape.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that I am drawn to themes of the natural world in my art practice. Working mostly in porcelain, I make casts of animal and botanical elements that I later assemble into hybrid combinations. My main studio process is slip casting, which involves pouring liquid clay into a plaster mould and removing the cast from the mould once the clay has dried into a firm state. It is immensely satisfying to pour the velvety smooth liquid into the cavity of the mould, removing it later as a perfectly formed shape. I enjoy the process of slip casting because it can capture incredible detail and the most intricate textures from the original object. Slip casting allows me to reproduce these fine details, expressing and re-experiencing the awe of nature in each final piece I create. Once I have built up a vast collection of slip-cast pieces, I then begin the process of manipulating them. I do this by bending, distorting, cutting and carefully combining them together by hand, meticulously sculpting and splicing parts into a seamless hybrid form.

In the past, I would collect natural items that I found particularly interesting, such as a beautifully shaped branch or textured seedpod. But I have recently begun to expand my collection to include human-made objects. This happened somewhat intuitively and unexpectedly when I stumbled upon a disused quarry close to our home whilst out hiking. The quarry site is a strange and dystopian place, eerily isolated and comprised of extensive concrete ruins and leftover bits of bulky mechanical equipment. Now an expansive wasteland, it has become a dumping ground where all kinds of rubbish and debris are littered among its graffitied remnants in surrounding hills and natural environment.

I was drawn to the curious objects abandoned in this strange place. Envisioning what they might look like in porcelain form, I sensed they would be exquisitely intricate and fascinating. I became interested in the idea of things thrown away, broken or cast off. Rubbish usually attracts a repulsive reaction. It is dirty and non-functional. As a society, we don’t want to see, smell or touch it. I was taken by the idea that by reproducing these discarded objects in porcelain I could instill new life and meaning into them.

I immediately started collecting and slip casting these thrown-away objects. Using the natural fusibility of clay, I began to graft them with organic forms. Grafting became a method that enabled me to propagate such diverse forms and bring them together, fusing them into unexpected hybrid combinations that began to blur the natural and artificial.

This experience transformed my art practice and resulted in my latest body of work titled Otherworld. Otherworld consists of a series of ceramic sculptures, grafted together using various casts of animal organs, branches, leaves, antlers, plastics, waste and human debris. The series comprises a growing amassment of diverse parts—animal, vegetal, and human-made—melding and intertwining into hybrid forms. Crumpled bottles and bulbous hearts transfuse into bits of rubbish, with branching tendrils and appendages. Interfusetranstwine, one of the sculptures in the series, features a delicately balanced heart, with grafted twigs and a plastic tube sprouting outwards from the wrinkled and bulging form. The title is a play on a fusion of words, creating a tangled portmanteau between “transfuse” and “intertwine”. Other portmanteaus feature throughout the series, with titles such as Skeletendril, Ghostory, Flutterleaf and Vascustem. The material qualities of porcelain, bonelike and ghostly in its final ceramic state, render these object-beings in an eerily dreamlike disposition. Each piece seems at once recognisable and yet ambiguous, alluring yet discomforting.

These artistic explorations bring me back to my childhood roots, causing me to question how we understand and interrelate with nature in contemporary society. The ghostly porcelain sculptures from Otherworld invite viewers to reconsider perceptions of beauty and value in a world where industry and nature are becoming increasingly enmeshed.

Otherworld was recently featured in the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition, and presented with two awards at the opening event; The Fetzer Award for Excellence, valued at $7500, and the City Rural Insurance Development Award, valued at $5000.

Further reading

Bennett, J 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.

Powell, D 2004, ‘Chimera Contemporary: The Enduring Art of the Composite Beast’, Leonardo, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 332-340.

Toma, M 2010, What Even Is Slipcasting?, East Fork

About Lauren Downton

Lauren Downton is an emerging artist who works in contemporary ceramics and installation, based on Kaurna land, South Australia. She combines animal, botanical, and human-made forms into ghostly hybrid assemblages that examine humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Downton was selected to exhibit in the 2022 Hatched: National Graduate Show at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Journal of Australian Ceramics and Art Edit Magazine, and she has received awards from the University of South Australia including The Australian Ceramics Association Award (2023), UniSA Art Honours Graduate Prize (2023), Vacation Research Scholarship (2022), and Harry P Gill Memorial Medal Award for outstanding work in ceramics (2021) among others. She has recently completed a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) at the University of South Australia. Visit www.laurendownton.com and follow @laurendowntonartist.

Tags

Adelaide | Australia | ceramics | G35 | South Africa | South Australia | with nature