The bowl filled with voices

Abstract

The conventional narrative of visual arts in Western culture is one in which art, craft and design are perceived as separate and distinct disciplines. However, ceramics practice presents a transgressive narrative, crossing these borders and troubling the visual arts worlds. In this study, I investigate how ceramics practice is perceived in Western culture, and in alternative holistic ceramics narratives found in other than Western cultures, specifically in Japanese, Southwestern U.S. Pueblo Indian and Western Arrarnta Aboriginal cultures. As a ceramics practitioner, my focus is on experience, my own and the participants, and the continuum of process rather than the isolated object, the nexus of this study being the narratives of what we make, how we make and how we see ourselves as makers. In order to arrive at an understanding of both the Western and Japanese, Pueblo and Arrarnta approaches to ceramic practices, I have employed a heuristic hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, basing my analyses on a series of face-to-face semi-structured interviews with ceramics practitioners in Australia, Japan and the United States. Integral to this study are my personal reflections and experiences as a ceramics practitioner and the insights I gained while undertaking this project. This study shows that these other than Western approaches to ceramic practice and process illuminate, challenge and trouble Western visual arts divisions and the reductive Western approach to the object. The other than Western understandings and practices present an approach to the visual arts which is inclusive and holistic and which acknowledges and values ceramics practice and process as culturally meaningful. This provides a significant addition to Western visual arts discourse concerning ceramics, potentially leading to changes in current approaches and understandings of ceramics practice and process in Australia.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Abby Mellick Lopes (Supervisor)