Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG)
21 August – 12 October 2025
Launch Event: Thursday 21 August 2025, 5.30pm–7.30pm
This August, I’m delighted to share my latest solo exhibition, Beneath the Fallen Petals – Uncovering the Seeds of Surrender, showing at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) in Ballina.
This body of work has emerged from a deeply personal place, a slow and contemplative meditation on life’s most profound transitions: death, loss, transformation, and the quiet beauty of letting go.
Working from my home studio in Cumbalum (North Ballina) on Bundjalung Country, I’ve spent the past year hand-forming ceramic vessels and sculptures that speak the language of the natural world, weathered stone, sun-bleached bones, delicate blooms. These works are inspired by ancient burial jar traditions from across the globe and our shared human impulse to mark endings with reverence.
At the heart of the exhibition are a series of ceramic burial jars, each textured with what I call my Narratives of the Earth surface design. Their tactile surfaces echo geological time, rock strata, tide-worn shells, and sedimentary lines, grounding each piece in the natural cycles of creation, decay, and renewal. These vessels are not just containers, but symbolic chambers of transition, places to hold grief, memory, and the liminal spaces between death and rebirth.
Alongside them sit sculptural works incorporating animal bones and fragments of driftwood I’ve collected from beaches after wild weather. Once full of life, these materials have been gently transformed and adorned with hand-sculpted porcelain botanicals. They act as bridges between the living and the dead, each bloom a gesture of tenderness, each bone a quiet offering of remembrance.
The idea of surrender is central to this work, not as defeat, but as a necessary and powerful release. It is through surrender that we soften, shift, and open ourselves to transformation. These pieces hold space for what is fading, changing, or already gone, and honour the slow, sacred process of letting go so that something new might take root.
My work doesn’t seek to replicate the burial traditions of other cultures from Indonesia and Egypt to Japan and the Philippines, but instead to honour their essence: the human need to ritualise endings and recognise the sacred in what remains.
This exhibition is also shaped by my lived experiences, time spent immersed in nature, and artist residencies in Japan, Italy, and at Gaya Ceramic Arts Center in Bali. These experiences have deepened both my creative practice and my understanding of the quiet strength and cyclical wisdom embedded in the materials I work with.
Beneath the Fallen Petals is an invitation to pause, to reflect, and to bear witness to transformation in its most elemental form. It’s about what lies beneath endings, the potential for quiet resilience, new life, and new ways of being.
If you’re local to the Northern Rivers or passing through, I’d love for you to join me at the opening on Thursday 21 August, from 5.30pm to 7.30pm at NRCG in Ballina. I look forward to sharing this deeply personal body of work with you and welcoming you into the space where clay, ash, bone, and bloom meet in reverence.