LAUREN FINN.
Lauren has been working as a social worker for the past 12 years, supporting people and communities in their recovery from traumatic life experiences. Her work is highly impactful and she realised in order to continue in her career she needed a creative outlet and a new form of expression, she was drawn to ceramics.
MY SIGNATURE STYLE
Connection, community and healing.
MY FINISHED PIECES ARE OFTEN HIGHTLY EMOTIVE AND DEEPLY PERSONAL
I didn’t realise how much I actually needed ceramics until I discovered that I was processing my work-related trauma through clay. Ceramics has become such an important part of keeping me mentally healthy that I cannot imagine not having my hands in clay regularly. I find it's also a way to explore and seek meaning and connection in my own life. For these reasons my finished pieces are often highly emotive and deeply personal. I can feel very exposed and vulnerable when they go to live with someone else.
wHAT DREW YOU TO CERAMICS?
Ceramics is a space just for me. Somewhere I can be creative, have fun and lose myself. It’s a calm space away from the busyness of the day-to-day. It’s also been a space where I’ve processed a lot of life’s experiences and a way to come to a better understanding of and make sense of life.
wHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND?
I studied a Diploma of Ceramics at the Northern Beaches TAFE for 6 years and was supported by the generous people in the ceramics community.
Throughout the Covid pandemic, I was working as a social worker in a hospital intensive care unit and I was able to put my love of clay to good use. My role involves supporting people who are dying, as well as supporting families around the end of life of a loved one and this includes memory making. It is a way to support the patient and their family to interact in a way that is a little more playful than the hospital environment usually allows during the process of dying and for the family to keep a lasting memory of their loved one. I can’t claim to have come up with the idea, but we now include the option of using polymer clay to make pendants with fingerprints from parents and children, husbands and wives, etc. While not ceramics, polymer clay makes this possible within the hospital setting. We’ve had a really positive response from patients and families and kids love the colours, as well as the chance to interact in a less clinical way with someone who is at the end of their life.
HOW wOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR WORK?
My work is about finding a connection with place and people and if I can manage to link it in with a common goal or memory, then all the better. I have enjoyed creating objects that hold meaning for me: by utilising clay dug by myself from places of significance, and by using glaze made by myself from ash taken from the remnants of fires that have had significance and connection to people, such as from the hearth of a loved one.
I first became interested in found or wild clay in a glaze-making workshop. It had never occurred to me that I could find and dig my clay right from the earth and then use this to make art and functional ware. So I started hunting, digging and experimenting. I did a lot of blundering along, just trying things out and seeing what happened.
I owe much to the patience and sage advice of the incredibly knowledgeable Chris James who taught my Diploma class. I’ve since found some wonderfully generous communities of people who geek out on found clay as much as I do, particularly The Wild Clay Club on Facebook.
Last year I also focused on incorporating glazes made from ash from fireplaces and bonfires that belong to people I love and care about and have a connection to meaningful events.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST?
There is so much to love: the technical challenges, the skill building and stretching my brain around new concepts and ideas, being free to explore and develop my style and processes, those ‘aha’ moments when all your planning and experimenting finally come to fruition and the excitement of opening the kiln after a firing.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE PIECE?
There is one piece I will never part with. My first ever found clay was from my Grandmother’s farm in Yorta Yorta country, which is also the country where I was born. I made a bowl from this clay and glazed it using ash from my grandmother's fireplace that kept her warm during her last winter. I gifted this bowl to my grandmother on her 100th birthday. She has since passed and the bowl has come back to me.
“FOUND” IS…
‘Found’ is the title of one of my major work pieces for my Diploma of Ceramics and is a good example of how my process typically goes. It’s made up of roughly 400 figurines coloured with found clay slips. What started as an experiment on how to use found clay as a slip, evolved into a deep exploration of re-forging connections to people, place and purpose in my life.
WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION?
I am extremely lucky to have an inspirational role model, my very talented Aunt, Marilyn Gourley, who worked as the Arts Recovery Project Officer with Regional Arts Victoria. This saw her working alongside communities in their process of utilising the arts to facilitate trauma recovery and community connectedness following their experience of the Victorian bushfires of 2009, which are also referred to as the Black Saturday fires. I feel incredibly honoured to have had the chance to learn from Marilyn about her experiences there and about the creativity, determination and healing in those communities following the fires.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Ultimately I would love to work alongside communities in projects aimed at trauma recovery and healing. I envisage this to be working with projects which facilitate people spending time together on their local land, finding, digging, processing and creating together from local clay dug with their own hands.
Contact Lauren at @loz_fin_ceramics