TESS MILLER
“Imagine ……when a is work made by the touch of the hand it attracts stories for the place where it was formed" - Tess Miller
Sunshine Coast–based ceramicist Tess Miller investigates the relationship between the embodied practice of working with clay and the organic forms that emerge through making.
Transformation sits at the heart of Miller’s practice. Through the physical acts of moulding, pressing and building, she creates broods or families of biomorphic forms that are ultimately transformed through the alchemy of fire. The resulting works feel both ancient and newly formed: tactile monuments that echo the rhythms, textures and irregularities of the natural world.
Working intuitively, Miller uses her hands as both tools and guides, responding to the material and listening to where the clay wants to go. Her forms explore the interplay between positive and negative space, solidity and openness, movement and stillness. Interested in translating gesture and movement into shape, Miller works with natural pigments and richly tactile clay bodies to create abstract forms that possess their own presence. Grounded yet open, familiar yet ambiguous, her works celebrate the physicality of clay and its capacity for continual transformation.
