A distorted wrought-iron gate near her inner-city Newcastle home inspired Holly Macdonald's ceramic installation sculpture, which has won the Brenda Clouten Memorial Art Scholarships prize.
The compositional piece, enigmatically titled This Water Thinks A Lot About Moving, is set against the wall like a painting with an element suspended from the ceiling before it.
Macdonald says the work "crystallised" her burgeoning concept of what ceramics can be - "playing with clay as a kind of surface or a canvas . . . loose with the sense of space."
As a non-medium specific prize, she says that the Maitland Regional Art Gallery award offered her the opportunity to explore "the feeling of not feeling limited or inhibited".
Early on, Macdonald briefly engaged with architecture and engineering studies, but realised her desire to construct existed on a smaller non-habitable scale.
She enrolled at the National Art School, majoring in ceramics. Then she moved to Melbourne, undertaking an Honours degree at RMIT that shifted her perspective from just the making of vessels, the traditional core of ceramic practice.
"I have been becoming more interested in clay as a canvas," Macdonald says.
A canvas that can be cut and dug into, built off, pinched, pressed and stretched, rather than a surface that hosts imagery.
One of the award's judges, Victorian artist Kate Rohde, says Macdonald's work has captured a "subtle" duality.
"You wouldn't even think of it as a ceramic piece to start with," Rohde says, "it's a very untraditional ceramic piece."
The installation plays on light and shadows at a distance and reveals the human touch when approached, she says.
"Up close you can really see her hand in the work, all the mark making."
Macdonald created the work based on the different "headspace" of coming to know a new hometown. While she spent childhood holidays mustering cattle at a family property near Scone, Newcastle was largely unfamiliar terrain when she moved here just a year and a half ago.
Being a newcomer, she says, made her more actively notice her surroundings and pick up on the details that create familiarity.
She became intrigued by "shapes and symbols in a suburban environment that seemed to me to speak about motion and water".
The wrought-iron gate that fixated Macdonald's attention is outside a home she walks past "almost every other day".
"The gate has become misshapen, it started to look like something else, there was a sense of motion," she says.
"That it evoked different interpretations from people interested me."
Macdonald viewed the gate at different times of day, as it threw out even more obscured forms in shadow. Her prize-winning work is a literal recreation of those various shapes that marked the gate's existence in Macdonald's world.
"Figuring out the movement in shape, or some way it's still connected to the real thing but it's started to pull away," she says.
Macdonald will use her scholarship to travel to the UK, visiting London's Victoria and Albert Museum and the York Art Gallery, which both hold extensive ceramic collections.
Her particular interest is in 20th and 21st Century British work, with a focus on influential senior English sculptural potter George Baldwin, who set an early benchmark for redirecting the vessel-focused artform.
Also, she will seek out the mixed media sculptures of Japanese-born Londoner ceramicist Nao Matsunaga, and the work of Sarah Lucas, who is part of the edgy, questioning 1990s Young British Artists generation.
It's important to "be in the same space as things, get out your ruler", she says.
"The next stage of knowing an object is to handle it, really understand the properties, its weight and feel."
Macdonald will also travel to Scotland to explore her grandmother's familial connections and the sense of place that filters through the generations.
She grew up eating off traditional ceramics - dinnerware made by her mother who had studied functional pottery in her early years, and also "Granny's crockery" which was cobalt-blue chinoiserie patterned Willow ware. "Trees by the river," and other quaint scenes.
"It's got a real something to it, that pattern" she says. "Ceramics runs pretty deep, the story of where that pattern came from or where that cobalt came from. It's nice to feel connected."
- The Brenda Clouten Memorial Art Scholarships are for Hunter-based artists 35 years or under. Finalist works are on show at MRAG until November 6.
