Clay dug from a farm. Timber that fell in the paddock. Stone rolled uphill from a hidden quarry. Pigment ground from rock. Of Earth starts with what lies underfoot and follows it into five bodies of work that share a material world but not a point of view.

Each maker went looking somewhere different. Fishing boats lined up on an Indian shore at dusk become vessels made for hands. Rusty buckets, oil cans and the skeletons of old machinery are rescued and reimagined in clay. Shapes waiting inside rocks are carried home and revealed. Weathered surfaces are burnished until they feel like pebbles polished by water and sand. Wild clays, sediments and pigments gathered along the coast carry the landscape itself.

The firing is as varied as the ideas: wood and salt, pit, raku, obvara and electric, with felled invasive olive trees feeding the kiln. Each method leaves its own record of fire and time on the clay. Running quietly through all of it is the rock formations of Wombarra, a shared source that every artist translates differently.

Five makers, one ground, no two answers alike.

Artist Bios

Aarti Manik: Aarti Manik makes vessels for hands, food and flowers, drawn to the forms and textures of the natural world. Her usual practice involves anagama firings of over 100 hours at Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, India. As Denbigh’s first artist-in-residence she is trying something different: farm clay, a faster wood kiln fuelled by local timbers, and an electric kiln, to see how the clay responds to each atmosphere. She wants her pots to be useful, but also to move people without having to explain why.

James Haney: James is a heritage builder who specialises in conservation, and he grew up running wild in the national parks and beaches south of Sydney. His work is shaped by geology and the slow forces of water and wind, and by materials that carry the marks of time. His workshop at Denbigh gives him exclusive access to a hidden stone quarry. He waits for a shape to reveal itself in a rock, then rolls it uphill to his studio.

Janinne Pemberton: Janinne is a ceramic artist working across sculptural and functional vessels, with a focus on materiality and structure. She collaborates weekly with fellow artists at Denbigh, testing clay bodies and glazes and experimenting with obvara, sagar firing and wood firing. She textures the outside of each piece and leaves the clay unglazed, adding only slips and oxides. Her work is burnished fine and smooth, like pebbles polished by water and sand.

Shanin Curran: Shanin is an artist and Visual Arts educator whose practice explores landscape, place and material, with a focus on ceramics. Her interest in wild clay bodies began at Denbigh, through wood firings and workshops, and has grown through time at Wombarra and a recent residency in Mallacoota. There she worked with local clays, sediments and pigments. Her work responds to the colours, textures and geological formations of the Australian landscape.

Susie McIntosh: Susie hosts local artists and potters at Denbigh, her family’s historic farm in Cobbitty. She works with farm clays, glazes made from fireplace ash, and fuels such as weeds, sawdust, seaweed and timber. The textures in ancient ant-eaten timbers, rusty buckets, oil cans and discarded machinery parts inspire her. She fires with pit, raku, obvara and electric kilns, and in “Olive Olsen”, a wood kiln fuelled by invasive African olive trees felled on the property. For this show Susie has thrown and roughly textured her vessels to suggest landscapes weathered over time.