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