Gillian Hodes
Location
About
Gillian Hodes is an emerging ceramic artist based in Sydney, Australia, Gillian Hodes creates porcelain sculptural artworks. She constantly tests the limits of the material, exploring the intersection between translucency, structural integrity and drawing in space.
Gillian made a mid-career switch from the corporate word to art in 2013, graduating with a BFA (Sculpture) from the National Art School, Sydney (2015), followed by a Diploma in Ceramics from Northern Beaches TAFE, Sydney, (2017). She won the Craft NSW 2017 Emerging Artist award and has been a finalist in numerous art competitions including the Emerging World Stage at Clay Gulgong 2024, and the National Emerging Art Prize 2023.
Donna McDonald PhD is an Australian writer and a visual artist who works with ceramics, based in Meanjin (Brisbane). Her publications, paintings, and ceramics explore themes of motherhood, children, identity, and sorrow. In July 2023, Donna held her first solo ceramics exhibition, Born in the Air, at Makers Gallery Australia. Her accompanying article, ‘Like a Prayer: Born in the Air’, was published in the November 2023 edition of The Journal of Australian Ceramics.
Joanne Linsdell is an artist living and working in Ballarat, Victoria. She develops her work from a deeply personal base that offers wider public relevance. Her sculptures, cast domestic and work-related objects, communicate a sense of the familiar. She then opens and transforms the interpretation of the work through idiosyncratic surface treatments. Linsdell strives to evoke memories and subsequent narratives across a range of mediums Linsdell has exhibited widely and participated in several artists residencies. She was awarded the Muswellbrook Open Ceramic Award and in1995 she completed her Master of Fine Art by Research at Sydney College of the Arts, including a six-month exchange at Glasgow School of Art.
Maria Kraatz is a ceramic and multi-media artist living in Darwin (Gulmerrogin), Australia. Drawing on her earlier career in natural resource management, Maria’s artworks tell a story of landscape, place and flow. Glass or timber is used as a backdrop for a multitude of individually sculpted pieces that mirror the flow of water in springs, creeks and on the beach. Sometimes she is led by the canopy of trees, or leaf litter on the ground, but there is always a curve; a movement or energy that never ends.
Maria has exhibited locally, regionally and nationally and has been a finalist in the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize. She has long-term and permanent installations in the local community and been the recipient of grants from Arts NT and the Darwin City Council.
Artist Statement
TETHERED
Theme: Cultural Exchange and Community Engagement
Sub theme: Ceramics and Wellbeing
Authors: Gillian Hodes, Maria Kratz, Joanne Lindsell, Donna McDonald
We are four artists who work with ceramics. Located across vast distances and disparate geographies in Australia, we meet on-line each week to write together and share our diverse creative experiences.
Each week, we have conversations about our work - and play - with clay. We share our celebrations, hopes, ideas, struggles; we share what we’ve learnt, the books we’ve read, the techniques we’ve explored. Each week, we explore a prompt offered by one of us through a process of spontaneous, unedited flow writing. We leave our video calls with a sense of renewal, feeling both grounded and excited about new possibilities. Our participation in this group helps tether us creatively, emotionally, and spiritually.
Each of us brings lessons to the group, some of which seem to parallel life lessons: the plasticity and possibilities of clay; the pros and cons of hand building and wheel-throwing; the expressive, narrative, and symbolic possibilities of clay; and the environmental politics of ceramics. Infused through all these clay-based conversations lies the wondrous power of listening with the possibilities of effecting change one conversation at a time.