Discover Every Cup
Meet the local Australian artists, potters and makers behind ADC's 60 Cups Morning Tea. Whose cup will you take home – it’s a surprise reveal! Ebony Russell, Sassy Park, Milly Dent, OCD, Brett Stone, Denise McDonald, Katherine Mahoney and many more artists have a made a cup for you!
60 Cups Morning Tea
When: Thursday 23 May, 10am-12pm
Where: Australian Design Centre, 101 William Street, Darlinghurst
Tickets: $120
Book here.
Grab one of only 60 tickets to the hottest Morning Tea in town to celebrate ADC’s 60th year. Your ticket includes one special cup handmade by a local ceramic artist and a catered morning tea. A wonderful gift for you or the ceramics lover in your life!
Special guest host Jess Scully will interview ceramic artist Ebony Russell recently returned from showing her work at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, New York and design writer Penny Craswell will read an extract from her essay On Cups, from the 2024 Penguin publication The Long Lede Anthology: Stories That Want to Be Told.
List of Makers
Amanda Digby
Amanda creates contemporary ceramics inspired by nature, place, memory and the passage of time. Her works highlight the simple forms of ceramics, using earthy and subtle glazes to achieve her pieces. She is one half of Making Time, a ceramics-focused gallery founded with Serena Owen.
Find out more at makingtime.com.au
Alexandra Standen
Alexandra explores the potential of clay as a ceramic form, subverting the long-held association between ceramics and utilitarian function. Alex makes things with her hands. The repetitive gesture of ‘pinching’ her hand-built forms is as much conceptual as it is an act of realisation. The conversation between materiality and form is ever-evolving with intuition and experimentation in equal parts leading to the creation of Alexandra’s forms.
Find out more at alexandrastanden.com
Bakehouse Studio Marrickville
Bakehouse Studio is a creative community space located in an old Marrickville bakery, also the studio of artist Lisa Hölzl. Lisa is an experienced ceramicist who crafts sculptural and unique works based around native Australian wildlife and flora. Her works are colourful and strong, with an emphasis on displaying various approaches to ceramic creation.
Find out more at thebakehousestudio.com.au
Brett Stone
Originally from Perth, Brett now calls Sydney home. He has long been around potters and their pots, which has taught him a great deal about life. Ceramics show that the humble can be impressive, and he loves the calm and contemplative process of making them. His work highlights how living with handmade bowls makes you more aware of what you put in them - they are functional, simple, and unadorned, they want to be used. Brett is a founding member of Claypool studio.
Find out more at @brettstoneware
Cherie Peyton
Cherie is a ceramic artist based in Sydney. As a member of Claypool studio, she creates works predominately in porcelain, and explores both simplistic and complex styles of ceramics.
Find out more at claypool.com.au
Clare Unger
Clare combines hand-stitching and ceramics in a way that is both playful and pleasurable. She explores narratives relating to family, identity and memory while being mindful that behind the façade of beauty that hand-stitched textiles portray, lies a hidden and sometimes dark history of women.
Find out more at clareungerceramics.com
Cobalt and Kin
Chrystie Longworth originally trained as a printmaker but transitioned to clay, revelling in the medium and its endless possibilities. Forged with the mantra "Treasures Worth Keeping", all her pieces are imbued with a feeling of the handmade, celebrating the little details rather than competing with machine-made perfection.
Find out more at shop.cobaltandkin.com
DM Pottery
Denise McDonald creates both wheel-thrown and handbuilt functional ceramics, using high quality glazes with depth and bold colour. Her elegant works strongly feature a range of iconic native Australian flora, with her signature Flannel Flower motif taken from a 100-year-old heritage stained-glass window.
Find out more at dmpottery.com.au
Ebony Russell
Ebony is an Australian artist who uses an unorthodox approach to construct ceramic sculptures. Her unique technique developed out of an interest in gendered aesthetics, labour and traditional craft practices. She methodically pipes porcelain in series of intricate layers to build gravity-defying forms, challenging the traditional making processes of decorative vessels.
Find out more at ebonyrussell.com
Emi Ceramics
The medium of clay is a great teacher of patience, meditation, ritual and beauty. For Melody Brunton the medium itself becomes a guide, imparting lessons that echo beyond the studio. The essence of her practice lies in embracing the fluidity of the process and allowing the tactile nature of clay to lead the way. Melody's practice embodies the harmonious blend of her cultural Japanese sensibility and the Australian landscapes she creates on.
Find out more at emi-ceramics.com
HAW Ceramics
Hayley West is an artist, designer and educator who works from a small studio on Gadigal land in Newtown, Sydney. In the last decade, Hayley has developed her practice and technical skills alongside working as ceramics technician and tutor. She has a focus on both design and functional wares.
Find out more at hayleyawest.com
Ingrid Errington
Ingrid works with timber and clay to create items that are foremost utilitarian, with a precision informed by her scientific background. From this starting point she adds elements of tactility to each piece so its use is a sensory experience as well as a functional one. Her work has a strong emphasis on sustainable practice, largely using reclaimed materials.
Find out more at @_thingrid
Public Holiday
Carly Buteux and Joe Dodd are a clay-making duo creating functional and fun ceramic vessels. With an emphasis on simplicity of form, pattern and colour, our striking pieces are made to bring joy to your everyday rituals. Every piece is hand-formed on the wheel and embraces the beauty of handmade. The natural colours and textures from stoneware clay have become a feature in the continuing development of Public Holiday’s ceramics and their signature pop of colour makes them instantly recognisable.
Find out more at itsapublicholiday.com
Jules Irving
Jules is a Sydney-based ceramic artist, always enamoured by the possibilities of clay in her hands. Her initial encounters with clay left an immediate impression and affinity for the ephemeral and tactile qualities of the medium. She is inspired by the native landscapes she is immersed in.
Find out more at @julesirvingceramics
Katherine Mahoney
Through the expressive and exquisite medium of wheel-thrown ceramics, Katherine creates tableware pieces and sculptural forms that are simple yet beautiful. She uses porcelain for its whiteness and ability to make colours sing, and stoneware for its durability. Her work is inspired by the colours and textures in Sydney’s landscape, particularly sandstone.
Find out more at katherinemahoneyceramics.com.au
Milly Dent
Milly reimagines daily routine through uniquely handcrafted, exclusive ceramic goods. Handmade using small-scale production methods along with distinctive marbling and geometric pattern work, the result challenges conventional expectations of functional ceramics. The underlying philosophy is based on the simple ideal of producing work that is both utilitarian and sculptural.
Find out more at millydent.com
Mud Dept.
Lea Durie’s work is all about a slower life with beauty and simple richness, wherein she crafts pottery tableware and planters by hand. The work is made of earthy stoneware clays, mostly thrown on a pottery wheel. The pots are fired in a kiln twice to create the wonderful dark speckled clay and muted glaze tones.
Find out more at muddept.com
Object and Ceramic Design
Susan Chen is a Sydney-based ceramic artist who creates both functional and sculptural artwork. With a background in industrial design, she is meticulous about detail and considers every aspect of the creative process, from ideation to production, a significant part of the completed work. The pieces are created using the slip casting technique and finished by hand.
Find out more at susanchen.art
Remy Pajaczkowski-Russell
Remy is a potter working on Gadigal land, where he makes wheel-thrown ceramics. Inspired by his studies in Australia and France, he developed his passion for woodfired domestic ware, slip decoration and the production of functional objects for ceremony, celebration and reflection. He often incorporates the intense and varied materials offered by the Australian landscape into his work.
Find out more at remypr.com
Rina Bernabei
Rina has worked in industrial design for the past 30 years and has brought her love of earthy, clean aesthetics to clay. Her work encapsulates her years of practice as a product designer as well as the relationships between handmade craft practices and digital technologies and manufacture. Her ceramic practice uses both handmade, hand-thrown and 3D ceramic printing.
Find out more at rina-bernabei.square.site
Rough Ceramics
Sarah Howes is the ceramicist behind Rough Ceramics, working from an industrial zone in Sydney's Northern Beaches. She designs and crafts each piece with a focus on creating small-batch functional wares that evoke strong design principles. She emphasises the necessity of creating work that that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Find out more at roughceramics.com
Sally Cooper
Sally has long worked in the arts but came relatively late to ceramics. For Sally, clay is a form of meditation, becoming a breathing discipline that keeps you focused and present. The infinite possibilities of a ball of clay are always presenting themselves. She is a founding member of Claypool studio, enjoying the spirit and companionship of other potters.
Find out more at claypool.com.au
Sassy Park
Ceramics is a medium especially suited to memorialising the intimacies of the everyday. Sassy's work plays with the accepted ideas of ceramics and art genres to express ideas of vulnerability and fragility. Pots speak of their own fallibility and painted figurative sculptures express empathy through her subject matter of poignant characters. Her work draws the viewer in to look more closely, to notice detail and engage with the object. Using scale and humour, Park's figures and pots reflect equally on questions of history and its representation as on the small moments of life.
Find out more at sassypark.com
Serena Owen
Serena shows her love of traditional crafts on the surfaces of her pieces, inspired by the work of her grandmother and great-auntie – two women obsessed with crafting. She makes lava glazes to suggest the softness of crochet, and inlays fine patterns or trace oxide patterns over the surfaces of her pieces to explore stitching styles. Serena creates functional and decorative wheel-thrown ceramics, which she loves to cluster into ceramic families. She is one half of Making Time, a ceramics-focused gallery founded with Amanda Digby.
Find out more at makingtime.com.au
Splendid Wren Ceramics
Catherine Field is the maker behind Splendid Wren Ceramics. Her pieces focus on functional simplicity and are made using traditional hand-building techniques from a range of stoneware clays. They are then high fired to stoneware temperatures to ensure their durability for everyday use. They feature natural, earthy glazes and no two pieces are the same.
Find out more at splendidwrenceramics.com
Studio Nicho
At its heart, Beanie Aldrett Flemings's work looks to blur the lines that divide her Western and Mexican cultural identities. She draws on an evolving visual language that explores and abstracts the colours, symbols, and histories that make up her identity. Studio Nicho translates her style into functional works, integrating art into the daily rituals and lives of those who covet the unique.
Find out more at @studionicho
TRADE the MARK
Christina McLean’s art and design studio focuses on hand-built and painted ceramic vessels, bespoke art pieces and textile design. TRADE the MARK studio and its output is constantly evolving, like Christina herself. Her work embodies her vision, values and creativity, striving to create deeply original works fine-tuned to the natural world.
Find out more at tradethemark.com
Vicki Grima
Based in Sydney, Vicki draws inspiration from the native coastal environment. Working across various mediums, her ceramic work often focuses on pinch-style pots created from singular balls of clay. She enjoys the meditative practice of expanding and forming the clay within her hands, and the handmade beauty that can be created with fingers.
Find out more at vickigrima.com.au