Sensory Clay - First Site Gallery
Curated by British born RMIT lecturer Jennifer Conroy Smith, Sensory Clay does not break boundaries as a group show, but does showcase promising artists from RMIT’s talent pool . On the whole, I found the show exciting. Ceramics is an under-represented field, but something I find is gaining more and more traction as emerging artists gain support. In particular, artists playing with form and blurring the barriers of materiality will be my enduring memory of this show.
Despite the exhibition introduction presenting the entirety of the show as looking at the “expanded practice” of ceramics, the only artist truly playing outside the bounds of the medium is Felix Christie’s HOME IS WHERE YOU ARE. I hesitate to call it a work so much as an installation. Christie uses video (looped on old, chunky, grainy televisions) alongside ceramics to explore grief and community. The ceramic cigarettes and ashtrays, bricks, and detritus evoke the aftermath of houseparties in the summer, when all that is left is you and your close friends, and the wreck of what your backyard has become. It was so nostalgic, I just wanted to sit with the work and feel nineteen again.
Lily Shepard’s vases are unashamedly historic. Painted entirely in blue and white, the vases, titled Enrichment, feel Grecian from design to glazing choice, but also deeply of our current moment. They are so human in their design and pictorial representations. Perfect symmetry is not the goal, nor are hyper detailed drawings, and for that I love them all the more. No matter the year it comes from, there’s something tongue in cheek about a vase depicting someone using that same vessel, a motif Shepard plays with well. The animals on each are vibrant and energetic. It made me want full sized amphorae, dinoi, and kylikes- our visual history is deeply intertwined with our everyday ceramic vessels, Shepard is acutely aware of this and puts this intertwined history on full display. I came back to the two works multiple times over my visit at First Site- archaeology unearthed in an artist’s studio in 2025.
Kat Craine’s Dusk on the Hume feels deeply of country, but had me thinking about my own Canadian country in autumn. Twisted forms that “permit the desire to touch.” Craine invites audiences to physically interact with the works. They remind me of antlers, shed every year, a staple of Canadian cottages, and passed around in elementary classes for show and tell. Craine’s work is the best of this, evoking wonder and excitement for me- how often do you go into a gallery and get to handle the art?
On the wall are cage-like structures by Larissa Linel. The forms she plays with could be in conversation with Craine’s work. The dichotomies To a Friend Going Blind, taking shape somewhere between a cage and ceramics, both meant to contain, held great tension through each work. Others are spikes and waves, presented on the wall of the gallery, reaching out to the viewer at eye level, threatening them.
This is a good show: these are post secondary artists, curated by a proven entity in Jennifer Conroy-Smith. My gripe is not specific to this show, but is present in it. I left the show reminded how every artist statement in this day and age is near redundant, as they all say the same thing. Artist statements can change your experience of a work, bad ones make you disengage, good ones have you lean in. Going into an exhibition, every artist is “contending” with memory, place, transference, and relationships. We seem to be in the age of artist statements all saying the same vague amalgamations of these words, especially in group shows. I am not of the belief that every work needs its own statement, or that they should be the first thing you encounter when entering an exhibition. In reality, every artwork is the culmination of everything the artist has experienced, whether conscious or not. Unlike what some art history professors will have you believe, artists do not create in a vacuum, pieces do not emerge fully formed. Of course they are influenced by memory- but what else? Tell me a story, tell me a joke, but I know that the art is infused with your memory- I am looking at it.
Sensory Clay is on at RMIT First Site until September 19th.