Guest Artist – Jane Barrow

Born 1957 in Bunbury, WA, Jane Barrow is a contemporary ceramic artist. Her recent collaborations with Elisabeth Cummings, a suite of painted hand-thrown porcelain pieces, feature in our 2025 exhibition Elisabeth Cummings & Jane Barrow: Ceramic Works, alongside a body of Barrow’s installation-based and sculptural ceramic work, Fragments of Silence.

Barrow’s work throughout her career has encompassed hand-thrown ceramic works and large scale installations of sculptural ceramic forms. Her practice is grounded in her engagement with historic Japanese pottery tradition and her personal connection with the environment that surrounds her – a connection rooted in spirituality, memory, myth and body. Reoccurring concepts in her works is are themes of emptiness and repetition. Drawing on the relationship between ceramic forms and architectural environments, her hand-thrown vessels are both containers for volume and space and containers for memory and meaning.

In 1982, Barrow completed an apprenticeship in Bizen pottery, one of Japan’s six ancient pottery traditions, with Japanese master potter, Isezaki Mitsuru, and interrelated training with his brother Isezaki Jun, both Cultural Living Treasures of Japan. Barrow’s work is held in prominent public collections, among them the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Victoria College of Arts, the Manly Regional Art Gallery, the Newcastle Art Gallery and Artbank. She has been a finalist in the Gosford Art Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, the biennial Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and the Chippendale New World Art Prize.

Jane Barrow lives and works in Mooney Mooney, on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Artist Website Instagram

‘For a ceramist, form is not just shape—it’s a negotiation between material, intent, and the elusive beauty of the natural world. Trying to capture nature in clay presents a paradox: nature resists containment, yet ceramics depend on it. A pot must hold; it must have a visual and sometimes pragmatic function. But how do you make it behold something as ungraspable as wind, erosion, rock or wild growth?

Nature’s forms are irregular, spontaneous, and dynamic. Clay, in contrast, dries, cracks, and remembers every touch. The ceramist must balance this resistance with a desire to echo nature’s rhythm—without turning it into imitation. This most often means embracing asymmetry, imperfection, and unpredictability, letting the material speak rather than dominate it with precision.

There’s also the deeper tension of human influence. While seeking to honour nature, the maker shapes, carves, fires—transforming raw earth through energy-intensive processes. In trying to contain nature’s spirit in a vessel, the artist inevitably alters it, mirroring our broader relationship with the environment: reverent, yet invasive.

Containment becomes both a practical and philosophical issue. A vessel is defined by the space it holds, but nature resists such boundaries. The challenge is to suggest openness within closure, to evoke wildness within form.

Ultimately, the struggle with form is the work itself. It reflects an ongoing, imperfect dialogue between human hands and natural forces’

– Jane Barrow, 2025