Tag: material exploration
Constance McBride creates sculptural figures in clay that move beyond representation to explore what it feels like to exist within a body. Hand-building each piece from stoneware paper clay, she allows every surface to hold marks of pressure, time, and change. Her figures often appear folded, compressed, or suspended in moments of tension, reflecting both strength and vulnerability. Influenced by nature, memory, and lived experience, her work treats the body as a “dwelling place,” capable of holding both safety and confinement. Through cracks, textures, and layered materials, she embraces imperfection as…
Daiana Bruj creates layered abstract paintings using fabric, collage, and upcycled materials that carry traces of lived experience. Often incorporating personal elements like worn textiles, her work builds surfaces that feel both intimate and deeply human. Colour leads her process, forming an emotional field before shapes and structure emerge, while each material adds its own history to the composition. Rather than depicting faces directly, her paintings explore presence through absence, capturing the warmth, memory, and quiet imprint people leave behind. Over time, her practice has shifted toward restraint, using fewer elements…
Faye Johansen’s practice begins with attention to nature, to material, and to the quiet traces things leave behind. Working across watercolour, collage, and handmade journals, she builds surfaces that carry both process and place. At the centre of her work is a powerful series of one hundred charcoal portraits of Indigenous children, drawn onto discarded books layered with torn maps, music notation, and fragments of text. Each material holds meaning, speaking to displacement, memory, and loss, while charcoal allows the faces to remain both present and fragile. Alongside this, her journals…
Laura Fox-Wallis works in silk and dye, a medium that demands both control and surrender. Her birds are built through layered colour, steam-fixed dyes, and years of technical discipline, yet shaped equally by chance. What sets her work apart is her willingness to let the material speak back—to allow bleeding, blooming, and unexpected movement to become part of the image. Nature in her work isn’t decorative; it’s symbolic of impact, imprint, and consequence. Each piece reflects a balance between intention and unpredictability, asking what remains after the moment has passed.
This article looks at five women who have shaped their lives around clay through steady practice, patient experimentation and close attention to the world around them. From glaze research to handbuilt forms, coloured porcelain to thoughtful functional ware, their approaches vary widely, yet all share a commitment to slow work, careful observation and a willingness to teach and support others in the field. Together, they offer a clear view of how contemporary ceramics grows through curiosity, routine and long-term engagement with material.