Amelia Lynch: Rockpools

The enchanting ceramics of Amelia Lynch distil the patterns, forms and colours tinting her lived experience of the Australian landscape. The Central Coast artist’s hand-built sculptures conjure sensed and seen elements of places she has spent time – Bouddi National Park, Wyrabulong National Park, Nunn’s Creek and Central Australia. Concave and convex micro-surfaces converge into amorphous organic forms that, although fixed and fired, seem to swell and surge from within their crazed and coloured clay membranes.

Through formal experimentation with oxides, stains, crackle, crawl and crater glazes, Lynch’s painterly surfaces evoke fragments of flora and fauna – the papery textures of eucalyptus bark, the powdery fuzz of wattle flowers, the undulating armour of yabby exoskeletons and the reflective dance of water in bush creeks. Australia’s otherworldly light glistens from within Lynch’s glazes, evoking different times of day, and the seasons. We can feel the warm shimmer of sun farewelling the day as it descends into a vast desert horizon, or mythical mist of a winter waterfall cascading in the rainforest. In these biomorphic and geomorphic forms, personal experiences of the landscape collide with shape, scale, and glaze technologies to create sculptures that are intuitive and free, yet refined and technical.

Lynch’s embodied responses to the natural world continue a rich artistic lineage in Australia. She cites as inspiration the extraordinary patterns and palettes of Western Desert Art, as well as the work of contemporary ceramic artists including Cybele Rowe, Peter Cooley and Brian Rochefort. Childhood memories of the subtropical rainforest behind Lynch’s house at Nunn’s Creek trickle into her ceramics, which abstractly incarnate the rock formations shaping the creek, and the native hooded orchids that would erupt each Spring. Microscopic moments, such as layered tapestries of leaves on the ground and the busy ecosystems in rockpools, mingle with broader observations of hills and mountains, mudflats and rainforests.

In Lynch’s cavernous coloured surfaces, designed to be viewed from all sides, stories of the land flicker before us in a rich and nourishing reel; fleeting yet memorable. All is still, calm, as a crimson rosella and king parrot fly against the dusk sky, a water dragon waddles into the rocks beside a cluster of blue dampiera, while a white spider flower watches on wisely. These works are visions of harmony, and peace – perhaps what we all need right now.

Elli Walsh

Principle Writer, Artist Profile