About Anna

I live in the small regional town of Castlemaine in central Victoria, Australia.

Art making has been at the centre of my life since childhood and led me to begin study at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and then move over to the Victorian College of the Arts to complete my painting degree in the mid 1990s. This ever present need for creative practice in my days finds voice in art and the making of music, the creating of gardens as places of nourishment, habitat, and beauty, food, walking the bush, my dear neighbours and friends.

Since moving to Castlemaine with my partner and our young son twelve years ago, I’ve found myself blessed by a proactive, creative, collaborative environment. Personal and community projects across so many areas have been a constant. Ranging from teaching art to children, facilitating weekly Ukeladies sessions, creating shadow puppet plays, cooking for friends, playing mbira, creating garden designs with my sister Cassia and more. And within this, discovering clay work about seven years ago.

Anna’s ceramics

A somewhat liberating practice for this painter, ceramics work led to participating in two successful group shows at the Digger’s Store. The first initiated by Ann Ferguson and the second in collaboration with Kaori Fujimoto. This all led to the founding of StudioSu, a small gallery/studio devoted to hand built ceramics with Ann and Kaori in Castlemaine in 2019. A wonderful space and a treasure for many visitors. A labour of love regretfully closed in September 2021 due to the prolonged effects of rolling lockdowns.

My ceramic works speaks almost entirely of my love, awe, and sorrow for the world around us. My intention through my work is to communicate this and perhaps also, to keep forefront in the minds of myself and others our connectedness and our deep need to understand this. To act with intention to foster and continually enhance connection, with each other but as much to the world of all other living things.

Always driven by a need to affirm and be nourished by this relationship with the world outside my window, I’ve found the process of transforming earth into stone unceasingly rewarding and fascinating. Whether functional, or totemically sculptural, my work speaks always to this reality of our interdependence. Clay has proved to be the most eloquent of mediums.

…and Parachute Press

Alongside ceramics my other major pursuit over the last few years has been the establishment of Parachute Press with my friend and longstanding creative comrade, Martine Murray. Friends since Art School, we both coincidentally moved to Castlemaine within weeks of each other and have shared schooling our children, walking our dogs, gazing in wonder and occasional consternation at the world around us and enacting amazing escapades of celebration together. With Martine’s experience as a published author and my illustrations, we have embarked on a quest to publish books for children that encourage a deeper understanding of human relationships and behaviour and a realisation of the need for connection with this natural world upon which we all rely for our very existence.