Amelia Lynch: Wildfire

Amelia Lynch’s visceral sculptures harness the primality of ceramics to capture a mosaic of moments felt and seen. The artist’s ongoing exploration of form and surface charts micro and macro movements within the natural environment: the slow erosion of stone, ripples of water over riverbeds, the layering of sediment through time. A breathing in, and out, of the land. These textural cartographies create a fertile space for memories and personal histories to coalesce with the landscape on a sensory level, as Lynch lays out an abstract map of her own felt experiences of nature. Through intuitive processes of shaping and glazing, the physicality of clay allows Lynch to explore the relationship – fraught as it may be – between the human hand and the natural world.

Clay is earth, the very flesh of the planet. By working with the ceramic medium, Lynch is not simply shaping a material; she’s engaging in a quiet, tactual dialogue with the land itself. Each coil, pinch, and impression becomes an embodied echo of geological phenomena. Lynch mixes her own glazes and underglazes and experiments with many techniques including crackle, crawl, and crater glazes, to mimic the textures and colours found in nature. Her biomorphic surfaces conjure the striations of bark, the shimmer of wet sand, the dance of coral, the pitted textures of rock, or the delicate scatter of lichen. Glazes pool like water in rock crevices, and crack like drought-stricken soil. These works speak a language of touch that incarnates memories of the land— felt underfoot, in the palm, under fingernails. In the metamorphosis of raw clay becoming stone through fire, we witness the same elemental forces that shape mountains and deserts, hatching a profound analogue to the cycles of nature: fluidity becoming form, fragility finding strength.

For the first time, Lynch has been working in reverse – cutting into the clay rather than building it up, creating skeletal frames that hang on the wall like primordial portals into another time and place. The portal, here, is a poetic trope, inspired by the very personal experience of witnessing her grandfather in palliative care. During this time, her family would leave the window open so his soul could leave peacefully, and this recent memory has shaped the way Lynch approached this series. In her hollowed forms we see body and soul twist and turn in symbolic courtship, the gnarled, almost-umbilical structures enacting a holding on, but also a letting go. Unlike her solid vessels, the emphasis on negative space in these wall works creates a sense of quietude, a space to breathe and to contemplate. They become a place for paradox, a criss-crossing of internal and external landscapes. White crackle glazes evoking bones and cartilage sit beside cratered coral surfaces in vibrant pastel hues. There is a new sense of movement in these works, as if they are morphing before our eyes, globby membranes and stretchy webs forming and unforming in a mesmeric waltz.

Lynch has been engaging with clay since she was fourteen years old. After years of personal experimentation as well as formal training at The National Art School, she has learnt to let go and work intuitively, “letting the clay decide what it wants to be”. Employing traditional hand-building techniques such as coil construction, she feels her way through each piece, listening and responding, never working from any preconceived idea or image. The vessels and wall works in ‘Wildfire’ are as much internal topographies as they are visions of eucalyptus bark, yabby shells, rock faces and rockpools, birds, native flowers and mountain ranges. From within they emanate the light and vibrant hues of the Australian environment – temporal palettes distilling different times of day and seasons. These deeply felt geomorphic form teach us that clay is more than a material, it is a conduit. It allows an artist to not merely depict nature, but to embody it, to feel it; to create with earth's own alchemy. Here, we witness the joie de vivre of the living earth.

- Elli Walsh

Principal Writer, Artist Profile