SONGS OF HOME, 2025

Songs of Home is a hand-built ceramic vessel that draws together two landscapes and two lifetimes, shaped by movement, listening, and remembrance. Around the outer surface, magpies and hoopoes sing in chorus—a meeting of voices from Australia and South Africa. Their call-and-response mirrors my own sense of living between places, where memory and presence overlap rather than replace one another. Inside the vessel, thin slabs of black clay, marked and brushed with rich orange slip, hold a quieter register, evoking the warmth, depth, and fragility of remembered experience. Behind the birds, gum leaves form a restrained backdrop — a flora shared by both countries — binding the work with a subtle, searching thread of belonging.

Born in South Africa and immigrating to Australia at fourteen, I have learned to navigate home as something carried rather than fixed. The sounds of the natural world have become my deepest language, a way of locating myself when words fall short. Where hoopoes once called to me, now magpies sing, and in their differences I recognise continuity as well as change. This vessel becomes a site of reflection — a place to hold the layered emotions of migration, the quiet persistence of memory, and the enduring music that teaches me, again and again, what home can be.

18 ×34 × 18cm

White and black midfire clay, stained paperclay slip, oxide washes and splashes of clear glaze.