A very mature body of work by a young artist beginning her career

Mahala Hill. EASS 2018 – ceramics. Watson Arts Centre. Until September 9.

Mahala Hill, Herbarium 5, in EASS 2018 –ceramics at Watson Arts Centre.

Each year at the graduating exhibition of students at the ANU School of Art and Design, awards are given out to students who show promise in their given field.

These are generous awards and do much to help the emerging artists begin their chosen careers. Among these awards is the  Emerging Artist Support Scheme.

The Canberra Potters’ Society is among the supporters of this scheme and each year offers to its chosen candidate the possibility of an exhibition in the gallery at the Watson Arts Centre. Mahala Hill was selected from the 2017 graduating class in ceramics.

Hill has garnered a slew of awards during her studies in the ANU ceramic workshops and since her graduation. This year she has shown her work in the ACT Assembly gallery as the recipient of their EASS Assembly Speaker's Award as well as being a finalist in the prestigious Waterhouse National Art Science Prize organised by the South Australian Museum.

She recalls that as a small child she was fascinated by the marine creatures that live at the water's edge. It is an interest that has carried over into her art practice where she has developed sophisticated ceramic skills to reinterpret the structures that define the complexity of living things.

In a technique known as a "burn out", Hill dips organic materials into white liquid clay. These materials can be anything from lavender stalks, seed pods, thistles, mushrooms, grasses and all manner of seed pods and plants such as carrot tops. When the clay is fired in the kiln, the organic matter disintegrates in the heat and only its shell remains - a ghostly white presence.

Mahala Hill, Neopasiphae simplicior Native bee in EASS 2018 - ceramics at Watson Arts Centre. 

One example that comes to mind are the outline cavities of the human forms left behind by the volcanic flows at Pompeii. Hill painstakingly fashions these skeletal-like remains into new creations.

In the current exhibition at the Watson Arts Centre, mushrooms, thistles and other plants are the basis for the Herbarium series nos. 1-5.

These fragile looking complex plant-like structures are placed in arrangements like specimens under a glass dome. They evoke the 19th-century interest in plant collecting, its study and classification.

However these plants, constructed in stark white bone china and porcelain, are hybrids assembled from various fired plants and therefore defy classification. Hill has cleverly anchored these plants in "rocks" made from clay.

These organic looking hunks of moulded clay are glazed and fired so their interior fissures spill open to reveal the glow of red and green recycled glazes. These cracks and schisms suggest the powerful forces that lie beneath the earth and have brought forth these strange hybrid organisms. In their pale fragility they are beautiful, with the component parts having the tactile appearance of living matter while in reality being brittle like egg shells.

Apocalyptic, which was Hill’s award-winning work in this year’s Waterhouse Prize, foreshadowed this exhibition. If an environmental disaster ever occurs, Hill postulates, perhaps it is only the humble insects that will survive. The ghostly reconstruction of the endangered native bee (neopasiphae simplicior) could as the artist suggests be one of the "soul" survivors.

Hill has arranged her series of clay insects on beautifully worked clay bases. These rock-like forms, packed with shards like an archaeological or geological dig, are traversed by fissures where glowing glazes seem to explode with cataclysmic energy.

The insects are made in the same manner as the plants. Organic matter is coated in the white liquid clay and then fired. The component parts are in all shapes and sizes, smooth and textured, thick and almost transparent.

From this collection of disparate parts the artist constructs the segmented legs, feelers and carapace-like bodies of her slightly larger than life-sized insects. It seems as if the artist has miraculously imbued these creatures with life.

Perunga ochracea–Perunga Grasshopper, 2018 by by Mahala Hill at Watson Arts Centre.

The wings on the bee (Native bee - neopasiphae simplicior) are of particular note, being rendered so expertly that they look soft and capable of fluttering at any moment. The insects depicted are on the official Australian government endangered list. They include Bournemissza’s Stag Beetles, the Southern Sandstone Cave Cricket, the Perunga Grasshopper, the Australian Dinosaur Ant and the Territory Imitator (Alinjarria elongate).

On display at the Watson Art Centre is a very mature body of work by a young artist at the beginning of her career. Like many young artists she is planning to travel to broaden her experience but it is obvious, as this exhibition makes clear, that she has already acquired many of the technical and conceptual skills needed for the next stage in her creative journey.