Selected Work
Biography
This practice takes place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing relationship between Country, clay, making and storytelling.
Materials: Dug clay, white stoneware, transparent glaze, iron-rich slip, terra sigillata
Dimensions: variable, seven works
Shown in Finite, Dowel Jones Showroom, Fitzroy, 8–17 May 2026. Curated by Lucille Sciallano (Alterfact) and Richard Greenacre, alongside Alyssa Nuttall, Billy Crellin, Blanche Tilden, Eugenie Kawabata, Franky Frankland, Ingrid Rhule, Isabel Avendaño Hazbún, Jennifer Conroy-Smith, Juan Castro, Mechelle Shooter, Nicholas Roder and Richard Greenacre.
Two buckets of it sat in my studio. The invitation of Finite was the occasion to process it. Sieving out rocks and organic matter, I worked with this material as a plastic clay, as slip, and as terra sigillata. There was a finite amount, and a limited window in which to get to know how it would respond to heat and to different ways of working. I had a finite supply to work with, and these pieces are the documentation of that research: a use of craft as a means of material inquiry.
Working with it has meant learning to listen to what it wants to do. The clay is highly plastic, with a very fine particle size. It shrinks dramatically and unpredictably. It ruptures under stress, sheds from surfaces it cannot bond with, moves in the kiln. In this work I have built forms that hold these behaviours rather than override them, pairing the iron-rich clay with white stoneware as a structural counterpart so that the agency of the dug clay has a voice.
If I had infinite time and material, I might have been tempted to override or coax the material into my own ideas of form; this exploration didn't allow me that power. The clay gave me a voice as well. It asked me to step out of the quiet control I have when throwing and into the sculpted: pushing the clay with my fingers, carving it with found objects. The cracks and fissures hold the rupture; the structural bases hold the work.
Photography: Kaede James Takamoto, 2026.
Material: Terracotta, Ball Clay, Red Iron Oxide
Dimensions: 227 x 297 x 5mm
Shadows cast by the landscape near my studio in Naarm are recorded with iron oxide, then etched away to reveal the pale stoneware beneath. The work juxtaposes two timescales: the slow transformation of geological time that makes clay from stone and the ephemeral shadows that are constantly changing but also anchor the work to a specific moment in time and place on the earth.
The abstracted shadows invite viewers to find their own figures in the contrasting surfaces, connecting deep time to the intimacy of each moment of attention.
shadows recorded along the Merri Creek in Naarm/Melbourne
Available for purchase at Craft Victoria
Working with Australian terracotta, I burnish each form with terra sigillata made from the same material, then project shadows collected from the surrounding landscape onto the surface. Using water, I patiently etch away layers of clay, inscribing ephemeral traces of light onto a material shaped by geological time.
The resulting work holds both: the slow transformation of stone into clay into ceramic, and the transient shadows that anchor each piece to a specific time and place.
Journal of Australian Ceramics, Vol 64, No 3, 2025
"To source one's own materials today is not a retreat into nostalgia but an act of adaptation and stewardship. Ceramics becomes not just a craft, but a tool for re-imagining our relationship with the earth, training our hands and minds to shape futures from what has been left behind."
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Terracotta clay, terracotta terra sigilatta, ball clay terra sigilatta and salts.
Materials sourced entirely within the Australian landscape.
Group exhibition with Claire Ellis,
Jane Sawyer and Kate Jones
Craft Victoria, Watson Place, Naarm/Melbourne
2 May – 15 June 2024
This exhibition forms part of an ongoing open-source material research project developed with Clay Matters. View the research →
Material Provenance formed part of the launch of Conscious Craft, a Craft Victoria initiative showcasing makers and designers who actively considered sustainability and ethics in their production methods and use of materials.
Containers for Care is a series of functional ceramic vases made from stoneware and terracotta clays from the Adelaide Hills, glazed with materials from traceable sites: ball clay from Axedale, gerstley borate from Boron California, nepheline syenite from Canada, calcium carbonate from NSW, silica from Lang Lang Victoria, wood ash from a local pizza joint, and the iron in the terracotta clay itself.
Installation images at Craft Victoria, photos by Sarah Forgie 2024
Amelia Black and Pattie Beerens in conversation
Journal of Australian Ceramics, Vol 63, No 3, November 2024
"For me, the 'wildness' of a material is not something that can be taken away, we just lose the ability to see it. Framing it this way positions 'wildness' as an innate or ingrained quality of matter rather than a description of human perspective."
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Part of Facts of Matter, Clay Matters
Linden New Art Gallery Project Space
23 February – 24 March 2024
Curated by Cinda Manins
Presented in partnership with CLIMARTE as part of the 2024 National Sustainable Living Festival.
Listen to a conversation about this work on the Tales of a Red Clay Rambler podcast with Ben Carter, Claire Ellis and Jane Sawyer.
Watch video of my artist talk.
The title draws from Wendell Berry: "We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired." Working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country as a white American, I wanted to make work that had a documented, accountable relationship to Country, not a romanticised one.
The modern ceramics industry is deeply globalised, relying on mined materials sourced worldwide. This work deliberately uses materials sourced entirely within the Australian landscape, as one small act of paying attention to where things come from and what that means.
Installation shots of the Facts of Matter exhibition at Linden New Art Project Space by Tina Wilkins Pictures
visit project website: Alternative Ceramic Supply
Testing Grounds Emporium, 432 Queen Street Naarm/Melbourne
25–28 October 2023
Part of Craft Contemporary 2023
Works from this project are held in the collection of the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, and are currently on view in Sustainable Ceramics #2: Investigating a Footprint (22 November 2025 – 25 October 2026).
The project disrupted the standard take-make-waste economy of ceramics supply. Ceramicists were prompted to question their usual methods of sourcing raw ingredients and their position in the supply chain. Visitors were invited to imagine what the pottery supply shops of the future might look like. It generated real conversations and helped gauge interest for more materials and future events.
Alternative Ceramic Supply advocates for the custodianship of materials rather than ownership, empowering potters to look at materials in their immediate environment, including local urban waste streams. Environmental, cultural and social responsibility in pottery is at the core of what they do.
Alternative Ceramic Supply: Amelia Black, Claire Ellis, Georgia Stevenson and Sarah Muir-Smith.
Photography: Michael Pham, 2023.
Vancouver Art Gallery / Hatje Cantz, 2013
Working with the archivist at the Waldorf Astoria and the New York Public Library, the research traced how the hotel developed its systems in the years following Black Friday.
What emerged was a portrait of a remarkably sophisticated service infrastructure: a high-tech antenna system delivering radio to every room, a card catalogue recording every guest preference across every stay, a notification system allowing staff to flag an arriving guest from the front door through the entire building, and a hidden network of staff corridors and elevators that allowed service to move invisibly through the hotel.
What we found in those archives was effectively the source code for a grand hotel, a 1930s manual of procedure for making people feel known without ever revealing the machinery behind it.
Project team: Jer Thorp, Ben Rubin, Mark Hansen and Amelia Black.
Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York
Working under land artist George Trakas, the research traced the waterfront's history through original and archival sources: from quarry, to industry, to the neighbourhood where Mark di Suvero and Isamu Noguchi established their studios in the mid-20th century.
In the archives, I discovered a municipal charter provision designating the waterfront as public space, something that had been forgotten in modern development. That discovery became the foundation for the project's culmination: working with the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a public waterfront park, returning the shoreline to the community it had always legally belonged to.
Project team: George Trakas, Lyn Rice, Astrid Lipka and Amelia Black.
The Architecture League of New York Toward the Sentient City Exhibition
The project established a two-way interface between land and water, making visible the invisible ecology of people, marine life, and public space.
Amelia Black participated as a Research Fellow at Natalie Jeremijenko's Environmental Health Clinic (xClinic), NYU.
Master of Fine Arts Thesis, School of Visual Arts, New York, 2010
"Smell accesses within ourselves powerful and embodied meanings, associations and feelings that unlike the other more cerebral senses are restricted by words."
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