Artist Talk with Mahala Hill

Transcript

Mahala Hill: Hi, my name is Mahala Hill. I'm 26 years old and I'm a contemporary ceramic artist. I strive to push both the limits and preconceived notions of my medium. My practice is centred around material exploration. I'd love to use faults and non-traditional methods to generate ideas and energy in my making.

Recently, my works are focused on environmental destruction and the plight of Australian endangered species. I've expressed this through constructing creatures out of burnouts. A burnout is a remnant shell-like form that is left after organic matter is dipped in liquid clay and fired in a gas kiln. I have thousands of burnouts in my studio which I use as components when building my creatures.

I first stated ceramic in college, when I dropped maths and took every class of ceramics available. I knew I had found my medium. I went on to study a Visual Arts degree at the ANU School of Art and returned a year later to complete my Honours. The year in between studying, I built a studio and exhibited as much as possible to develop my personal artistic voice.

The two biggest influences on my practice have been Greg Daly and Julie Bartholomew. I had the privilege of being taught by Greg for three years. He inspired me every day, taught me about materials firing, and encouraged me to play and experiment. Nothing was ever unachievable – there was always a way.

Julie Bartholomew was my Honours supervisor. Julie showed me ways to look at the work I was making intuitively and see what the work was saying. By doing this, it made me realise that my practice was discursive in nature. Material exploration leads to conceptual ideas, which inspires the next stage of experimentation. Julie also pushed me to have confidence in speaking about my work and realising that the more I spoke about it, the better understanding I would have of the work itself.

I started the piece Armoured Mist Frog in 2017. I remember seeing a burnout that looked like a broken frog skull and knew that it would form the start of a ghostly creature, though the final piece didn't come together until early 2020 when I found the right base for the frog to perch on and express the dire situation that the skeletal frog is representing.

Which leads me to March 2020. I knew I wanted to enter the North Queensland Ceramic Awards, though I found myself standing in the studio in the evening and producing no work. I was stuck and usually when I get in these less creative moments, I fire a gas kiln and experiment with glazes.

Because of COVID-19, I was unable to access a communal gas kiln to fire any work whatsoever, so I had to open up my mind to re-look at what fired components I already had in my studio.

Late one evening, I decided to go through a few boxes of old experimental glaze tests and started to pull out different pieces and lay them out on my big three-metre bench and then I found myself excited again.

Eventually, I placed the constructed frog on this bubbly volcanic base, and it just clicked. I thought to myself, "This is it, this is right". The front foot sits into a divot, the proportions are pleasant but also creates a feeling of tension that the frog's home is oozing and toxic.

The thing that I would find hardest to live without in my studio would be my wood fireplace. I live in regional New South Wales, and it gets bitterly cold in winter. I especially notice the chill when I'm sitting for hours gluing up insect joints, holding each single joint for 20 minutes at a time to get the right angle and expression of movement.

The best lesson and piece of advice I've been given is not being handed the answers to questions I had but rather encouraged to test and experiment and discover the answer for myself. This allowed me to draw my own conclusions and work through ways to make what I saw in my head. Basically, just do it and see what happened.

The biggest challenge I face when exhibiting my work is its fragility. Transportation and packaging has been something I've been working on for years and I'm still trying to find better ways to pack my work while not compromising on my artistic vision.

Though the most rewarding part of sharing my work with the public is seeing the different reactions that my work creates. I enjoy people having strong feelings towards my work, whether it's favourable or not, rather than no reaction at all.

It's hard to decide on a favourite piece from the exhibition, but from the moment I saw Piped Dreams: Pink Ombré Canyon by Ebony Russell, I was intrigued and excited. I haven't been able to see the piece in person, but the images and on the virtual tour, the piece made me want to get up close and look at the textures and shapes that were formed through the layering of clay.

Thank you for listening and being interested in my art practice. I hope to share more work with you very soon.