Armoured Mist Frog

City of Townsville Art Collection Award – $10,000 Acquisitive

Mahala Hill

Armoured Mist Frog 2020

Bone china, porcelain, stoneware, volcanic glaze
8 x 17 x 15 cm

About the Artwork

A waste environment. An apocalyptic vision. The new normal.

A spectral frog perched on a contaminated geological form, colonising the post-apocalyptic landscape, creating its own new world order. This arthropod embodies the living dead, a ghostly shell of their former self. Constructed by the meaning of and process behind the ‘burn out’– the remnant form after plant matter is asphyxiated in clay and incinerated. Hollow yet uncomfortably resilient, it simultaneously evokes traces of life and loss. This sculpture challenges the anthropocentrism which pervades us, depicting ‘the rest’ as the sole survivors of our inevitable apocalyptic, environmental demise.

I am drawn to the less studied Australian arthropods; they are small yet intricate. Arthropods are not charismatic megafauna, considered useful, or directly beneficial to humans. This anthropocentric gaze prompted me to consider and explore ways in which the plight of these creatures might be represented.

About the Artist

I love to play in mud. I have vivid memories of making mud pies in my mother’s best Tupperware, heaped to the brim and garnished with weeds. Very little has changed. I still spend almost every day elbow deep, completely covered, in mud.
Mahala Hill

Mahala Hill is a contemporary ceramic artist, striving to push both the limits and the preconceived notions of her medium. Hill’s practice is discursive in nature; material exploration generates ideas and extends her conceptual intent, bringing to the foreground further questions or conundrums for investigation. In this sense, the process of questioning materials and works directs and informs the next stage of creation. Through her work Hill explores curiosity, wonder, beauty, death, the apocalypse and how by using these motifs she can raise awareness of pressing environmental issues including the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and the survival of Australian endangered species.