Internationally acclaimed Western Australian ceramicist Sandra Black is being celebrated in her first comprehensive survey of works at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) from Saturday 5 October 2024.
Sandra Black: Holding light spans over 50 years of practice and surveys important touch points in Black’s career from 1972 through to her current practice.
Featuring 123 works, the exhibition includes 18 works from the State Art Collection and key loans from the artist’s personal collection, the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Gippsland Art Gallery, Edith Cowan University Art Collection, Curtin University Art Collection, City of Fremantle Art Collection, and private collectors.
Foregrounding the quality, delicacy, and understated confidence of her work, Sandra Black: Holding light reveals the artists concern for design, craftsmanship and the natural world. These elements converge to imbue her work with a treasure-like quality that is both enticing and intimate, yet relatable.
Since the late 1970s, Black’s process of carving and piercing slip cast and thrown clay vessels has been central to her practice, forming a key focus in this exhibition. However, Sandra Black: Holding light also showcases select examples from her various ceramic series, some of which veer away from carving processes.
This diversity highlights how Black’s personal and professional experiences – including encounters with nature, love, loss, study, teaching, travel, and international residencies – have shaped her work, intersecting with and evolving from her career long practice of carving and piercing clay.
“Black’s ceramics are formal and refined, echoing the rhythms and flow of nature while locating a balance between fragility and strength, both materially and as a reflection of the motions of life,” said AGWA Associate Curator, Isobel Wise. “A master artisan, she challenges the limitations of clay to create forms that encourage the interplay of light and the surrounding environment within and around her ceramic forms.”
“The space a vessel contains, the air space that passes through decorative elements, and the space Black occupies while thinking and making, are equally vital elements in her creative practice. As such, through her work Black steadies the interior and exterior, motion and stillness, dark and light, within her objects and within us,” she said.
Sandra Black was born in Victoria in 1950 and came to live in Albany, Western Australia with her family in 1965. She trained as an art teacher in the late 1960s and began teaching at Governor Stirling High School in 1971. At the end of her first year Black was tasked with teaching the ceramics lessons at Governor Stirling, so she took classes at the UWA summer school with artist Joan Campbell.
Black continued to teach at Governor Stirling for four years while also taking night classes in art and ceramics to further her skills. After studying at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT, now Curtin University) she was awarded an Art Teacher’s Associateship in 1975 and following this, Black was appointed by Head of Craft and Design David Walker as a resident graduate and part-time tutor in ceramics at WAIT.
Since that time, alongside her arts practice, Black has taught at universities, via residency programs, TAFE and community art centres. Her regular participation in national and international artist residencies extended her conceptual and material approach and aided in developing her connections with artists throughout the world.
In 1977 The Art Gallery of Western Australia acquired a set of three porcelain pieces by Black. In 1979 the National Gallery of Victoria and Powerhouse Collection acquired her work and by the mid-1980s the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia followed suit.
Black went on to become internationally renowned for her works made with bone china and porcelain, and in addition to representation in national collections throughout Australia, Black now has works in institutional collections in Japan, Canada, USA, New Zealand, China and New Guinea.
She is referenced in over 20 publications and has been the recipient of multiple national and international commissions and awards. In 2023 Black was honoured by the World Crafts Council Asia Pacific Region in their Craft Master Awards for the Asia Pacific region.
Sandra Black: Holding light
The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Cultural Centre, Perth
Exhibition: 5 October 2024 – 16 February 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.artgallery.wa.gov.au for details.
Images: Sandra Black, Pair of pierced geometric bowls (black/white) 1996. Porcelain, pierced and carved, (1) white; 10 x 19.5 x 19.5cm (2) black; 10 x 19.8 x 19.8cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchase and partial gift of the Friends of the Art Gallery in memory of Margaret Hatcher, 1997 – photo by Victor France, © Sandra Black, 1996 | Sandra Black in her studio 1989, photographed for AGWA Artist in Focus 6 – photo by Greg Woodward, The Art Gallery of Western Australia