Beneath showcases Ceitas Atelier’s Prologue, research into Australian artists, and an index of stimuli to effectively curate it’s desired presence.
Prologue
Design - Christian Duyckers
Investigative Research, Conversations
Maps That Melt The Memory of Ice
Visual Compendium - Ceitas Atelier
Shells, 2024.
Photographing seashells is more than a way of admiring their beauty; it is a means of engaging closely with the details of the natural world. The camera forces attention to aspects often overlooked: the intricate spirals, the subtle ridges, and the way light plays across the surface.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
Photography - Christian Duyckers
Stimuli Index
Ceitas reliably credits these artists where due. The use of these images is purely for innovative purposes, cultivating as an index of stimuli.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: "New Itineraries", Musée de'Elysée,
Lausanne, June 13 - September 8, 1991
Measurements: 58.6 × 92.7 × 36.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1985.
©The estate of Inge King
David Noonan, 2017, Common Editions.
Jungjin Lee, 2025
Sidney Nolan, 1940.
Oil on canvas, mounted on composition board, 73.3 x 88.2 cm
Barbara Hepworth, London, 1943-1958.
Plaster on wood base.
12 ⅞ x 15¾ x 11⅞ in
Hashimoto Naotsugu, 2003. 11.2 × 6.2 cm
Alexander Calder, 1936.
Lignum vitae, walnut wood, paint and steel rods.
51⅞ x 24¼ x 11⅜ in
Deborah Turbeville, 1976.
High Diver I
Gerhard Richter, 1965. Oil On Canvas 190 x 110cm
Provoke Group, Tokyo, Nitesha, 2023
I do not consider design as a practice to be somehow separate from the act of making. I think of design-in-making, rather than design-and-making. But of course there is necessarily a starting point which precedes an actual engagement with material. For me, that starting point is an idea of or about something — an object. It is an idea in the form of a visualisation. That is what lies at the heart of design in my practice. The act of making then involves an active process of thinking and acting to realise, literally to materialise, the form of the object. Each object made at the wheel, subsequently glazed and fired, is the result of discovery through shaping and reshaping. In this way I have not made, for instance, one thousand bowls of a particular kind, but rather, one bowl one thousand times.
How does an area like the Blue Mountains provide a sense of hospitality for a ceramicist like yourself? I recall the Blue Mountains being a place of serenity for me in my youth, bringing forth feelings of elation.
I have said on occasion that I feel ‘surprisingly comfortable in my skin’ living in the Blue Mountains. In many ways it is a privilege to live in a place surrounded by world heritage listed wilderness. And it is an extraordinary environment: over a thousand metres above sea level, rugged and impenetrable terrain, massive cliffs and escarpments, big sky and far horizons. Sometimes I think that the external environment is a mirror to the internal landscape. The string of towns which populate the upper mountains are within easyreach of the city of Sydney; on clear days you can see the city skyline in the distance below. I think that at heart I remain a big city dweller. But I like the sense of space around me in which I live and work. It is very convenient. My commute to work is from the back door of my house, along a short garden path to the workshop.
Your series of teapots demonstrates your specially honed dexterities as a ceramicist; contextually I personally have little experience of creating ceramics, so I would like to ask about your minimal use of colour within your creations, what constitutes this choice?
The major preoccupation, the aesthetic motivation in my work is in finding expression for a language of form. Stemming from the ideas and actions — the gestures — of making, I hope to get close to, to brush up against perhaps, a little poetry in ordinariness. Just that. In this context, if any one element of design should predominate it may obscure a desired visual, tactile and, hopefully, sensual quality held in and around the materialised object. Colour then, such as it may appear — or disappear — in my work, is simply supplementary. It arises only in an integration of elements as well as, and crucially, in response to specific material choices.
What birthed your passion as a ceramicist? Was it an early discovery?
My interest in ceramics stems from influences in my childhood and teen years in South Africa. My father was a sculptor. He made models in clay for larger public commissions later cast in bronze. I had access to all the clay scraps and trimmings accumulated over years, in a large outdoor tank in which I loved to play. I much enjoyed also, visits to the clay studio at the art school where he taught. Still in the family, an aunt of mine had had an early training as a thrower and decorator in the pottery industry. In her later years she was well known as a maker of ceramic tile panels and an exemplary practitioner of on-glaze brush work. Her studio was a place of inspiration to me. And lastly, an uncle was a geologist who instilled in me an interest in rocks and minerals and the formations of the earth.
I am quite drawn to the imbalance of uniformity within the designs of your bowls, I was wondering if you could explain your reasoning for this as for me, they appear to provide the bowls with a sense of elegance.
Working with clay at the potter’s wheel continues to be really compelling for me. I love the process — the way of working — and being in that expanded moment. I like working with soft clay on a slow wheel, and to achieve efficiency in attaining a design purpose through a necessary economy of gesture. And I think that the art of throwing at the wheel is all about gesture, movement, timing and pace. It’s a very interesting question. I am certainly drawn to making particular things. This is why I enjoy making multiples of ‘the same’ object — it’s always a discovery and is inherently a creative process.
Sometimes I get caught up making a particular thing, it may be certain bowls or boxes. It may be plates, whatever, but it won’t let me go because the discovery is not complete, or not at a stopping point. Even though I make multiples the same things many times I am always drawn back to those same forms — or the idea of them. I suppose it’s like a repertoire that I play again and again and it’s never quite the same.
So far as a feeling of reassurance or comfort goes, I would say that all of the objects of my making provide me with this. But sometimes getting to the point in the making cycle in the life of the workshop where I can put one series aside and move on to the next can be quite difficult. This is because I need to feel a sense of comfort or reassurance — and I stress it’s never a complacency — about the work that I’m producing at any one time before moving on to the next. I enjoy also developing and discovering new forms from time to time of different and divergent aesthetic and functional purpose.
©© 2025 Ceitas Atelier. All rights reserved.
Return