Steph Wallace, Holding the void; ceramic, glaze, 12k gold lustre; approx. 41cm x 24cm; image courtesy of Craft @craftvictoria; photo: Sarah Forgie
Our June Laurel has made a vessel that reflects the volcanic and mining cavities that resonate through her second home in Ballarat.
My work is all about cultural identity, the transformation of landscape and bringing to light what is unseen. This work, ‘Void VI’, was created for exhibition at Craft Victoria as part of a series of large, thrown vessels used as substrate to tell the stories of the colonial and historical legacy of where I live. To speak about my work is impossible without speaking of this place, Ballarat on Wadawurrung Country, which has been home to me for the past 15 years. As my fingers have sunk deep into the clay of its earth, its landscape has become an irrevocable part of its narrative.
The work is created using layers of slips, oxides, foraged clays, textural glazes and embedded with abstract linework. I see these semi-enclosed forms almost as a core sample drilled from the earth’s crust. They tell stories of what is hidden beneath the surface, the myriads of mining tunnels worming their way underneath the city I call home. They hint at stories of decay, impermanence, transformation and deep cultural shifts echoed by the landscape.
Steph Wallace in her studio
Ballarat is a place where the story of the earth is ever-present, from the extinct volcanoes it’s surrounded by, to the mining cottages built by the white colonists of the 1800s gold rush. My studio sits on a hill overlooking the surrounding state forest, mere meters away from the first finding of gold by settlers in 1851. This neighbourhood, once ravaged by mining processes, is forever scarred by this moment, both in its physical form and in its people. This history is impossible to ignore, my forest walks are punctuated by old diggings, mineshafts and channels cut through the forest floor. As I carefully apply gold lustre in my studio, the ground is shaken by the blasting of contemporary gold mining deep inside the ground beneath my feet.
This body of work has been my response to living in this place, being surrounded by this landscape, and the stories it screams at me to tell have altered my practice forever. I recently became an Australian citizen after living here for almost 20 years, but I think my practice realised long before I did that the part of me that is ‘British’ is very small indeed. I have cast off the perfectionism of pristine porcelain and elegant forms from that part of my heritage, and instead, I have embraced the earth on which I create. My hands now yearn to create something much more grounded in the ‘where’ as well as the ‘why’. This urge has propelled me to combine my traditional knowledge and skills from formal ceramics education with an experimental approach using materials found in my landscape to make work that is an interrogation of place, imperfection and historical scars.
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