WELCOME POTTERS!
The Bundaberg Pottery Group Inc. hosted the 49th Wide Bay Burnett Pottery Convention in 2024. The theme was RECYCLE, which aims to inspire creativity and sustainability.
We invite you to look back on an unforgettable event dedicated to the art of pottery and the importance of recycling.
We acknowledge the financial assistance the Queensland Government and Bundaberg Regional Council provided.
MEET THE ARTISTS
Fleur Schell & Cathy Franzi
Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery
Thursday, 10 October 2024
The Wide Bay Burnett Pottery Convention 2024 started with a meeting of the talented artists Fleur Schell Art and Cathy Franzi, who will be presenting at the convention. The Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery hosted this event.
Fleur Schell
Perth, Western Australia
For the transcript of Fleur Schell’s speech at the ‘Artist Talk’ at the Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery: CLICK HERE
Cathy Franzi
Canberra, ACT
Regrettably, Cathy was unable to attend the talk due to the cancellation of her flight. We understand that such circumstances can arise unexpectedly and appreciate everyone’s understanding.
THE OPENING NIGHT
Bundaberg Pottery Group Workshop and Gallery
Friday, 11 October 2024
THE CONVENTION
OUR TUTORS
Moore Park Beach Community Hall
Saturday 12 & Sunday 13 October 2024
Cathy Franzi, Canberra, ACT
Cathy Franzi is a full-time studio artist exploring botanical and environmental themes. In 2015, she was awarded a Doctorate in Visual Arts (Ceramics) from the Australian National University School of Art & Design. Her doctoral research investigated scientific and cultural values attributed to plant species, including a study of historical ceramics, prints and botanical illustrations in museums and galleries worldwide. Through her art practice, she explores how Australian plants and environmental knowledge might be expressed in ceramic form and surface.
Cathy has developed a distinctive textural approach to representing Australian flora, adapting aspects of printmaking methods and composition to the ceramic medium. She creates her own materials, tools, and processes, and her final work evokes relief, intaglio, or block printmaking. Vessels are wheel-thrown using porcelain and then altered, giving movement to the form from which to respond with surface imagery. A plant’s form and character are captured using sgraffito, incising or hand-drawn stencils, and flower colour using materials such as glaze.
Cathy will demonstrate how to ‘draw’ on the clay surface using textural imagery techniques, such as carving, sgraffito, incising, impressing, slip and ink inlay, stencilling and water erosion relief. These are all techniques that Cathy uses in her practice. She will begin with wheel-throwing and altering porcelain. Cathy will talk about handling the clay, exploring wheel-thrown forms by changing shapes from the symmetrical, and creating large forms by joining sections of the wall before altering. Sgraffito’s techniques will focus on ideas inspired by printmaking, such as using a white line and black silhouette approach. She will demonstrate the use of different tools to create different marks, including tools she has made herself.
More Info:
- Web: https://www.cathyfranzi.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cathy_franzi
Fleur Schell, Perth, Western Australia
Fleur Schell is a porcelain and mixed-media artist, illustrator, writer and presenter. Her childhood memories are of building zoomorphic characters from wild clay on the farm where she was raised near Goomalling in Western Australia. Today, her art practice is centred around story-telling and re-wilding the imagination. Through narrative objects, Fleur creates a room or habitat in our imagination for threatened native animals. Fleur often refers to her children or her own childhood when exploring child-like magical thinking. Today, Fleur’s home and studio are a memory palace of objects that reflect her lived experience. It is where ideas hide. By marrying the familiar and the unexpected, Fleur captures the inexplicable magic that occurs between the immaterial or imagined and those material objects that stabilise us.
Fleur will build a series of utilitarian objects that are playful and ergonomic. Using her recognisable soft slab construction style, she will explain how texture, detail and contrast are used to tell a sentimental story. As she makes her extraordinary pieces, Fleur will explain why porcelain cracks, warps, splits and slumps and why compression by pinching and layering of porcelain is the key to successful complex hand building. You will learn why water, climate, tools, work surfaces and your hands change the behaviour through rolling, pinching and layering porcelain. How the behaviour of porcelain under heat is considered when designing and building. Scale, the contrast between busy and still, and the importance of detail and fragility that resonates at the edges of a form will be discussed. Her demonstration focuses on the details of the parts to achieve a rich and sentimental whole.
More Info:
- Web: https://www.fleurschell.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fleurschellartist/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleurschell
Wendy Hatfield-Witt, Brisbane, QLD
Wendy Hatfield-Witt has been a practising artist and teacher of functional and sculptural ceramics for over 30 years. With a Bachelor of Ceramics (Honours), Wendy’s primary focus is to create work that is both aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian works, believing that one can never have too many pots in the kitchen. Throughout her career, Wendy has taught wheel throwing, hand building, decorative techniques, and glaze technology to beginners and advanced students.
Wendy enjoys telling personal stories through text and images. For her, images create a story that is open to interpretation and allows the viewer to find their connection. Long before the written word, images created their own narrative, telling stories of life. Motifs evolved from beliefs and patterns that represented an era. The decorative objects we choose are an important part of an individual’s identity and personality.
My demonstration will be an explanation of photographic screen printing on clay.
All areas of the process will be explained including emulsion types, preparation of screens, and the types of inks suitable. Preparation of appropriate stencils will be covered in detail, including how to manipulate these to suit the process of exposure. The screens prepared during the workshop will be exposed and then be printed on a variety of forms. The most complex will be a teapot which will be thrown, assembled and then decorated with photographic images. An explanation of where to source appropriate imagery will be covered in great detail, including how to extend appropriate images into decals if desired.
More Info:
Avi Amesbury, Bundaberg, QLD
Avi Amesbury received a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Ceramics), with Honours from the Australian National University, School of Art in 2002. She was awarded an ANU International Exchange Scholarship in 2000 and studied at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Republic of Korea. She has been artist-in-resident at the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramic Centre in Tel-Aviv, Israel (2017), the Fremantle Art Centre, Western Australia (2022) and Central Craft, Alice Springs (2023).
Her work has been selected for national and international exhibitions and her work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, the Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery and the Townsville Regional Gallery.
Avi is a member of the Council of the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva, and is the Council representative for the Oceania region.
Avi Amesbury collects clays dug up from different parts of the landscape and tests them for their colour response on porcelain. The results become her palette, used to capture the colour nuances of the Australian landscape. The process of collecting is a strong human impulse and Avi uses this process as a way of capturing or holding the essence of a place or landscape that affects our lives. That is, she uses colour as a storytelling device to explore ideas of land, history and connection to place.
Avi will demonstrate how she tests found clays for colour, and how she combines slab, stamping, press mold and slip casting techniques to create finished work in porcelain. She will share her creative process and the inspiration behind her work.
More Info:
Web: https://www.aviamesbury.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AviAmesburyCeramics
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/avi.amesbury/?hl=en
Jill Lyle, Yandaran, QLD
Jill Lyle has been involved in arts and crafts from her childhood to the present day. From 1997 to 2000, Jill was teaching principal at West Hill School and was successful in obtaining a RADF grant to support two mosaic artists to work with the children. Jill learnt alongside the students as they decorated their terracotta pots, and then, a larger project of Australian animals on a cement tank. This was the beginning of Jill’s love of mosaics and teaching others the craft. In 2023, Jill coordinated a mosaic project at the Bundaberg Pottery Group’s shed, where potters came together to make mosaic panels that were used to create a beautiful mosaic wall.
Jill will give a ‘how to’ hands-on demonstration of how to make mosaic work. She will talk about how to choose suitable pottery pieces; the different types of backing and sealants, planning a design and laying out pieces for the design, breaking and cutting pottery pieces, and gluing and grouting.
Anita-Lee Summers, Moore Park Beach, QLD
Anita-Lee Summers is a proud Aboriginal woman who grew up on the country of Ngandawol (Tweed Heads) and Yugembah speaking people of the Gold Coast region. Her traditional connections are to Ugarapul/Yuggera (South East QLD) and Bidjara (Western QLD) peoples.
Anita-Lee’s passion for pottery began at primary school, and she vividly remembers collecting clay from her front yard, making pinch pots, and baking them in the oven. Coming from a highly talented family of Aboriginal artists, Anita-Lee was taught the Aboriginal art style of south-east Queensland, which differs from the dot work prevalent in a range of Aboriginal art products today. Anita-Lee was also taught that art is a deeply connected practice that preserves the many layers of Aboriginal culture, as it is all very much connected to her Aboriginal Ways of thinking, knowing, being and doing.
Meredyth Castro – Buxton, QLD
Meredyth Castro is a member of the Firehouse Potters Club in Childers and a member of the Wide Bay Burnett Potters Association. She has enjoyed making pottery for a number of years and has been involved in the art of recycling for much longer. Meredyth enjoys using a variety of recycled materials and has made a double bed, two single beds, a table, and a lean-to for her barrel firing kiln, bee boxes, mosaics and stained glass. She has been highly commended in local art competitions and her kaleidoscope made from a 44-gallon drum and found materials, was exhibited at the Judith Wright Contemporary Art Gallery in Brisbane.
Meredyth will demonstrate how to make different tools from recycled materials. She will bring some pre-made tools that are more complicated to make, and will hand out her plans on how to make them.
THE COMPETITION
Moore Park Beach Community Hall
Saturday, 12 October 2024
IMPRESSIONS
Moore Park Beach Community Hall
Saturday 12 & Sunday 13 October 2024
THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS
We acknowledge the financial assistance the Queensland Government and Bundaberg Regional Council provided.
We thank the outstanding members of the Wide Bay Burnett Potters Association and the Bundaberg Pottery Group, who have volunteered countless hours to organise such a fantastic convention. It would not have been possible without you.
A big thank you to Catalyst Directions for designing our new WBBPA logo and designing and printing our beautiful booklet and to the Bundaberg Regional Galleries for their support.
We also thank the Moore Park Beach Community Hall for opening their doors to us and the Moore Park Beach Bowls Club for hosting our memorable dinner. Your generosity and hospitality have made this a truly unforgettable event.
James Campbell & Bevan Moller
Catalyst Directions Bundaberg
We thank our wonderful sponsors for their incredible support, and their generous donations of items and prizes.
- Sirens Pottery Supplies
- The Clay Shed
- Pottery Supplies Milton
- Kookaburra Marketing Consulting
- Flight Centre Hinkler
- U3A Bundaberg
- ArtPlus
- Heather Watling
- John Maybanks
2024 Convention Booklet
2025 COMMITTEE
Till we meet again
We can’t wait to see you in Hervey Bay at the 50th Wide Bay Burnett Pottery Convention in 2025!