Craft - Making it as a Maker

Cassie Hansen is a Kyneton-based (Taungurung) ceramicist, creating midfire and stoneware vessels and tablets that combine wheel-thrown and hand-built elements. Her work is inspired by her interest with the simplified forms and linear qualities of various architecture periods and movements, as well as the shadows and compositions captured in architectural photography.

As the former editor of design magazine Artichoke and current editor of InteriorsAu, Cassie draws on more than a decade of experience looking critically at architecture, interiors, design, furniture and objects. She began ceramics in 2016, and in 2018 spent a year learning from renowned ceramicists Neville French and Kate Jones at Shane Kent’s Melbourne-based ceramics school, the School of Clay and Art (SOCA). She has exhibited at Modern Times, Stockroom, Michael Reid and Curatorial and Co galleries. In 2023, she was awarded the $10,000 Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize and mentorship.

Practising since 1977, Prue Venables is one of Australia's most accomplished ceramicists with a demonstrated mastery of porcelain, and now the addition of metal to her work.  Represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney, her work has evolved from traditional functional objects to groups of abstract sculptural entities that inventively play with space and form. Venables was selected as the Australian Design Centre’s ninth Living Treasure, Master of Australian Craft; World Craft Council Asia Pacific Region Craft Master; and finalist In the Loewe Craft Prize, New York. Decades of teaching in Australia and overseas have accompanied her making practice. She is an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London.

Minaal Lawn (b. 1977) is an Indian - Australian artist from Central Victoria on Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Glenlyon). She is recognised for her ceramic sculptural works marked by her materially restrained and colour-driven vocabulary.

Her use of repetition transforms the physical act of making into a profound personal ritual. A powerful sense of multiplicity emerges from the accumulation of her small forms, where her ritualised labor questions the industrialised ideal.