Michael Reid Clay is delighted to present Pulse by Jeannie Holker, who was awarded the highest honour for a ceramic artist at last year’s National Emerging Art Prize. Befitting the leafy environs of The Garden Gallery on the grounds of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, Holker’s beautiful new series of large-scale ceramic sculptures invites fresh perspectives on how we relate to nature by plugging into the little-perceived frequencies that reverberate through the non-human world.

“Pulse is a collection that explores interspecies communication,” says the artist, who sculpts her scrolling, spiralling forms, fossil-like seedpods and totemic insect deities on a scale that conveys primordial heft and monumentality, albeit tempered by the weathered surfaces and nuanced effects wrought by the firing process.

“The ecosystems we inhabit are constantly exchanging information. Our capacity to perceive these interactions is shaped – and often limited – by our Umwelten: sensory frameworks and assumptions rooted in our own perspective. The living world emits a continuous pulse, a signal transmitted and received through an intricate web of sensory experiences.”

Guided by field research and beginning with drawings, photographs and found elements before letting her themes slowly coalesce, Holker describes her process as intuitive and driven by storytelling. “I embrace imperfections as part of the narrative,” she says. “Each piece captures a moment or idea made tangible through clay.”

Holker triumphed at NEAP 2024 with Giant Pill Millipede, which connected the evolutionary endurance of ancient, elemental forms with both the vicissitudes of her medium and a sense of human resilience in the face of hostile environments. She now returns with an ambitious body of work that similarly binds conceptual rigour with a sense of natural wonder.

“I hope my work opens a window into the deeper concepts that shape how we connect with the natural world,” says Holker. “I want viewers to feel renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for the complexity of life – its beauty, fragility and constant transformation.”

To discuss works from Pulse by Jeannie Holker, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Clay is delighted to present the solo exhibition debut of Eora/Sydney-based ceramic artist Annarie Hildebrand, who was the winner of the top honour for ceramics in the 2023 National Emerging Art Prize.

Titled Transience Cubed and showing throughout November at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Hildebrand’s new body of work beautifully melds influences from architectural and natural environments. The artist says her series emerged from a meditation on containment and transience – a duality made material through her work’s dynamic interplay of squares, cubes and glazes that glisten like ice.

Hildebrand produced this exquisite series while completing an extensive, yearlong mentorship with Michael Reid OAM, gallery director Toby Meagher and NEAP curator Amber Creswell Bell. Together with an acquisitive $5000 donated by NEAP’s founding sponsor, Morgans Financial Limited, this professional development formed part of the suite of prizes she received for her 2023 porcelain piece, Castles in the Air.

“The square, a fundamental geometric shape, represents stability and order. The cube embodies volume, suggesting physical presence and the weight of limitation,” says Hildebrand, who, in addition to her NEAP triumph, has also been a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize and the Hunters Hill Art Prize. “Ice, represented as a glaze material, introduces an ephemeral quality, challenging the permanence of these geometric forms. It is both a literal and metaphorical vessel, capturing fleeting moments of contentment while simultaneously reminding us of the inevitability of change.”

With its elegant dance between structural form and figurative evanescence, Hildebrand’s sculptural vessels ask us to consider how we might frame or contain our own experiences, emotions and memories. “Just as ice can encase, it can also melt away, leaving only traces behind,” she says. “This duality invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships with containment – what we hold dear and what slips through our fingers.”

The altered states evoked by her work’s gentle tonal gradations and shimmering, crystalline surface effects quietly suggest an embrace of change, “encouraging us to find meaning in the spaces we create and the forms we inhabit,” she says. “I seek to capture the delicate balance between stability and change, inviting contemplation of our own experiences of containment and letting go.”

For more, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au