WELL-known Swan Hill artist Suzanne Connelly-Kildomitis has recently expanded her art practice from weaving, to take on ceramics.
It was the rich mud on the banks of the Murray River that, as a child, drew Connelly-Kildomitis into exploring this other traditional Indigenous art form.
During trips to the riverside with her father she would make clay balls, animals and cups – anything she wanted to – and then leave it in the sun to dry.
She recently participated in the Koorie Heritage Trust’s Blak Design program.
The outcome of that program is the ceramic exhibition, Fired Up: Stories Through Embers and Earth, which opens on Saturday at the Yarra Building in Federation Square in Melbourne.
Connelly-Kildomitis is one of nine artists participating.
She said the early works as a child left to dry in the sun would crack, but she loved doing it because it was from the earth.
“It was exciting to explore a relatively new material in the Blak Design course,” she said.
“I was especially drawn to lumina clay which, when worked to a thin consistency, is translucent.
“But the ideas I had about what I wanted to make were completely different by the end of the course.”
One of the recurring themes in all of her work is the story of the Seven Sisters, the famous cluster of stars visible in the southern hemisphere that is often referred to in traditional storytelling and imagery.
As she thought about this, her ideas began to evolve.
She wanted to integrate weaving patterns into her work, along with representations of the Seven Sisters, as well as using the emu feathers that have always graced her weaving works.
“A lot of people know the story of the Seven Sisters but I want people to be more involved with our mob stuff, so I imagined a scene you can put yourself into – sitting around the campfire and looking up at the Seven Sisters and being told a story about them,” she said.
Using the clay, she made disc-shaped pieces of various dimensions to represent the stars, trying to approximate their scale relative to each other in the same way they appear for anyone gazing up at the stars.
In the installation, by hanging the discs on fishing line, she has set them into their positions as seen in the night sky, along with the moon.
Connelly-Kildomitis said those balls are not dissimilar to the ones she made by the banks of the Murray River as a child.
