Fleur Schell
Location
Goomalling, WA
About
Fleur Schell is a ceramic artist who resides in Perth, Western Australia. Schell combines porcelain and mixed media to create meaningful narrative-based installations. The themes she references are inspired by Schell’s immediate surroundings and the impact humans have on the natural world. Schell was raised on a farm near the wheatbelt town of Goomalling in Western Australia. Her qualifications include a Diploma of Ceramic Art and Design from the Western Australian School of Art and Design, a degree in Visual Arts from Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, and a First Class Honours Post Graduate in ceramics from the University of Tasmania Australia. Over the past decade, she founded SODA International Ceramic Residency and The Clay House Ceramics Centre to nurture the Ceramic Arts of Western Australia. Fleur’s artistic career has spanned nearly three decades and enabled her to live, work and present in China, Singapore, Finland, Canada, the United States, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom. Her work has been published in numerous books and journals and is represented in private and public collections throughout the world.
Artist Statement
Build an endangered creature with Fleur Schell
This demonstration workshop welcomes all delegates and pubic on Walylup to join Fleur schell under the trees of FAC, around the edges of an endangered species mandala to make their own endangered species creature. Fleur will lead a team of BioSPHERE Boodja artists, and explain efficient ways to make a voluminous form and bring it to life through detailed eyes, nose, beak, claw, fur etc. We invite each finished creature to rest at the growing edges of the mandala as a symbol of interconnectedness, as we all seek to become more porous at our edges. This is an all-ages workshop that will run for 2-3 hours each day throughout the four days of the conference as a way of bringing the communities of Ballardong and Walyalup together through clay and story telling.
The Earth is presently in the midst of a mass extinction event in which a large number of living species are threatened with extinction because of environmentally destructive human activities. I am hoping this demonstration workshop builds a habitat in our imaginations for threatened species. Making a claw, a beak or a tail of an endangered creature builds a room for it in our imagination. Even just giving it a name and discovering it has the same physical traits as us naturally makes us more empathetic to other species. It is time to shift from viewing nature as something that’s 'nice to have' to acknowledging it as the most fundamental factor in our civilisation's survival.