education resource and teacher's notes - Townsville City Council

Phil Gordon’s ceramic cars are playful and engaging - both Les and Stock Car are brutish looking machines
that look straight from an episode of Wallace and Gromit.
Gordon’s influences are varied; he graduated from the University of Tasmania with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in
1983 before becoming a member of and exhibiting with the Chameleon Artist co-operative in Hobart in 1984.
Gordon moved to Queensland in 1985, and from 1986 to 1990 he worked in Fashion and Screenprinting,
designing and printing, and building props and silly cycles for the hugely popular Expo 88, which is widely
recognised as Brisbane’s ‘coming of age’.
Phil then spent 5 years as creative advisor and food stalls co-ordinator of Woodford Folk Festival, and has
worked on construction, design and concept development for the Shoe Theatre for a number of years. His
ongoing interest in and engagement with cars was explored in his 2002 Doggett Street Gallery exhibition
Road Works.
Margaret Dodd was born in Berri, South Australia, in 1941. She was part of the ‘funk’ ceramic movement that
originated in Davis, California, during the 1960s. Her work centres on the car as a twentieth century Australian
icon; a theme that she has developed through ceramic and sculpture into video, film and installation.
Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra as well as the state galleries
of Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales. She lives and works in Adelaide,
South Australia.
Discussing Garage Deity, Dodds stated, “It was made thinking about kiln gods, and the relation between pre-
Columbian ceramics and those 1950’s car designs with Indian names like Pontiac.”
On the topic of the ceramic works she has produced in Australia after returning from Davis, California, she
stated, “My best ceramic pieces in Australia have been the iconic (now) Holden cars of the 40’s and fifties,
especially the ones I made for a film, This Woman is Not a Car, which were a Holden Bride, one with hair curlers,
and so on. I still do ceramic sculpture, as well as video and film projects.”
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