Beeing catalouge 2022

Beeing
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre

Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre is supported by the
ACT Government, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy –
an initiative of the Australian State and Territory
Governments, and the Australia Council for the Arts – the
Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body.
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre acknowledges
the Ngunnawal people as the traditional
custodians of the ACT and surrounding areas.
We honour and respect their ongoing cultural
and spiritual connections to this country and the
contribution they make to the life of this city and
this region. We aim to respect cultural heritage,
customs and beliefs of all Indigenous people.
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre
Tues–Fri 10am–5pm
Saturdays 12–4pm
Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit,
Canberra ACT Australia
+61 2 6262 9333
www.craftact.org.au
Cover image: Mahala Hill, Corrupted Growth 1, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of artist
Page 4-5: Dr Julie Bartholomew, Habitat, Artist in studio, 2022. Photo: Photo Courtesy
of artist

Beeing
Dr Julie Bartholomew + Mahala Hill
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre
7 July - 27 August 2022
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Beeing
Exhibition statement
Dr. Julie Bartholomew | Mahala Hill
This exhibition features the work
of established craft-based artist Dr
Julie Bartholomew and early-career
contemporary ceramic artist Mahala Hill.
The title of this exhibition is aspirational
because it refers to the continuing survival
of bees, beeing pollinators and beeing in
existence. Populations of bees are on the
decline on a global scale. They are severely
impacted particularly in Australia since the
Black Summer fires. The loss of billions of
insects is little understood, and there are
consequences for humans because bees are
major pollinators and sustain biodiversity.
Beeing aims to bring greater visibility
to bees through the craft practices of
these artists. Both artists aim to utilise the
aesthetic power of craft practice to engage
audiences and encourage critical discourse
around the significance of bees and threats
to biodiversity.
Presented with support provided by an
Australia Council for the Arts grant.
Image: Mahala Hill, Corrupted Growth 111, 2022.
Photo: Courtesy of artist
page 8 & 9: Dr Julie Bartholomew, Detail of
Habitat 2 with bees, 2022
Page 10: Dr Julie Bartholomew, detail Habitat 1,
2022, earthenware, terra sigillata. Photo Greg
Piper
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Beeing
Dr Julie Bartholomew and Mahala Hill
Artworks drawing on the natural world
are common across craft, design and
art but it is only relatively recently that
they convey such a sense of urgency, an
urgency mirrored daily in other spheres. In
this show, Julie Bartholomew and Mahala
Hill give voice to one particular area of
concern: the planet’s bee population.
Her research process for this project has
been, as always, rigorous; previously
she has worked with scientists involved
in Antarctic geological investigation
and here she worked with beekeepers,
learning their craft, testing her ideas and
designs.
Bartholomew and Hill met in 2017 when
Bartholomew, then Head of Ceramics at
ANU School of Art and Design, supervised
Hill’s Honours project. Since, their shared
interest in environmental issues has seen
their dialogue develop in ways profitable
for both.
Bartholomew presents two bodies of
work referencing the ovoid beehives
commonly found hanging from tree
branches or attached to other natural
(sometimes man-made) structures. One
group of works is primarily sculptural in
intent while the other can, with minor
additions, act as a functional habitat – a
beehive for a domestic setting. These
latter, in the spirit of ceramics from the
domestic realm, propose answers to
questions. How might a beehive serve
both bee and beekeeper? How might it
be both useful and aesthetically pleasing?
There are distinct echoes in her forms
of a European ceramic heritage with
the glaze, known - appropriately -
as ‘Honey glaze’, along with its red
earthenware clay understrata, familiar
from early English domestic ceramics.
Like all of Bartholomew’s work, all is finely
considered and crafted, with materials
knowledge, construction skills and
attention to detail everywhere evident.
Mahala Hill’s works are also the result
of a keen interest in how material and
process might communicate ideas. Her
works are at once beautiful and fearsome
and although they appear at first glance
to be alien from ceramic tradition, her
materials are clay and glaze, her methods
exaggerations or amplifications of usual
ceramic process. Rather than thin glaze
coatings, litres of glaze are fired in clay
forms then wrenched from the kiln at
high temperatures causing fault lines and
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shattering as chemical forces suddenly
collide; these provide the base terrains.
Hill draws on research into bee types to
invent her insects (a wing borrowed here,
a leg there), all constructed in multiple
segments using organic matter dipped
in liquid clay. Then once dry, in a process
that brings to mind the smoking of bees
from the hive, the organic material is burnt
out, leaving the fragile bee parts to be
painstakingly assembled into one mutant
insect-form. Attached then to their solid
now-fired glaze terrain, each arresting
figurine-like work spells out an unsettling
vision.
Art intersects with the real world in
BEEING, by way of dialogue coupled
with theoretical and studio research.
Bartholomew’s expressive sculptural forms
posit solutions, albeit on a small scale but
the impulse here is optimistic, constructive
at heart. Hill’s work on the other hand
presents a dystopian vision, a warning of
sorts broadcast in mutant form and postapocalyptic
colour. The choice, the artists
seem to lay out, is ours.
Dr. Patsy Hely
July 2022
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Image: : Julie Bartholomew, 2022, Honeycombing
7 & 9, photography Greg Piper
Page 14-15: Mahala Hill, Plastic Disease 4, 2022.
Photo: Supplied by artist

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Mahala Hill
Biography
Mahala Hill is a contemporary ceramic artist
based in regional NSW, striving to push both
the limits and the pre-conceived notions of
her medium. Hill’s practice is discursive in
nature, material exploration leads to ideas,
extends her conceptual intent and brings
to the foreground further questions or
conundrums for exploration. Recently Mahala
has been exploring curiosity, wonder, beauty,
death, the apocalypse and how by using
these motifs she can raise awareness of
pressing environmental issues.
Hill’s practice has been centred around the
process of the ‘burn out’. A ‘burn out’ is
the remnant shell-like form that emerges
from inside a layer of liquid clay after the
combustible organic plant material has
incinerated. The residual matter is a ghostly,
shell-like phantom form or ‘burnt out’ spectre,
simultaneously evoking traces of a life and
a loss. This process of directly creating a
brittle clay form from transformed organic
matter is a crucial element underpinning Hill’s
exploration of what has happened and what
is currently happening to the environment.
Mahala has exhibited widely within Australia
in both group and solo settings. Her work is
held in several public collections including
City of Townsville Art Collection, Macquarie
Group Collection, The ACT Legislative
Assembly Art Collection and private
collections within Australia and Singapore. In
2020 Mahala was awarded City of Townsville
Art Collection Award and the Macquarie
Group Emerging Artist Prize.
Artist Statment:
Compromised environments, The new
normal.
Skeletal bees, triumphantly surmount the
contaminated geological forms/landscapes,
creating their new world order.
The bees embody the living dead, a ghostly
shell of their former selves. They are
constructed by the meaning of and process
behind the ‘burn out’–the remnant form
after plant matter asphyxiated in clay and
incinerated. Hollow but uncomfortably
resilient, they simultaneously evoke traces of
life and loss.
The compromised environments have taken
on a life of their own, growing, adapting.
Illustrating the disfigurement of the natural
world and the increasing adversities that the
Australian bee populations face.
These sculptures challenge the
anthropocentric view, depicting ‘the rest’
as the sole survivorsof our conceivable
environmental demise. Stressing the need for
action to prevent the continued loss of these
critical creatures.
Image: Mahala Hill, Hive 2, 2022
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Dr Julie Bartholomew
Biography
Dr. Julie Bartholomew completed a PhD
in 2006, Master of Visual Arts in 1999 and
previously, a Bachelor in Visual Arts from the
University of Sydney. Julie has exhibited both
nationally and internationally in Japan, Taiwan,
China, Korea, USA and New Zealand. Julie was
winner of the International Gold Coast Ceramics
Award in 2006 and has been the recipient of
five Australia Council for the Arts Grants, plus
the Tokyo Studio Residency, the Australia-China
Council Red Gate Residency in Beijing and the
Asialink Taiwan Residency. Her work is in many
collections including the National Gallery of
Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the
Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria, the Shanghai
Arts and Crafts Museum, China, the WOCEK
International Ceramics Collection, Korea and
The Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan.
Artist Statment:
The ceramics practice of Dr Julie Bartholomew
has been inspired by cultural issues and social
debates. Over her career, Julie has explored
communication technology, global branding
and female identity. Since 2010 her work has
responded to environmental concerns and
associated cross-disciplinary research with the
intention of creating conversations around
species extinction and our climate emergency.
Previous projects, such as Endangered, Rarely
Seen, and Subversive Botanica, investigated
the perilous existence of threatened Australian
birds and flora. Climate Scrolls: Antarctic Ice
Memory was a project that combined Julie’s
practice with scientific research by responding
to the work of Australian scientists extracting
ice cores from Antarctica for climate research.
Beeing continues Julie’s interest in species
extinction, in this case the decline of bee
populations, as well as a belief in the power of
art and exhibitions to transform debates about
environmental challenges.
Image: Dr Julie Bartholomew , detail Habitat 2
without bees, 2022. Photo:
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List of works
1 Julie Bartholomew, Habitat
1, 2022 Earthenware clay, terra
sigillata surface
$1,500
5 Julie Bartholomew,
Honeycombing 7 & 9, $1200 each
2 Julie Bartholomew, Habitat
2, 2022, earthenware, terra
sigillata, H 55, W 25, D 42 cm,
photography Greg Piper, NFS
6 Julie Bartholomew, Habitat 2
without bees, 2022 Photomedia
$300
3 Julie Bartholomew, Prototype
for Habitat 2, 2022 Earthenware
clay, terra sigillata surface
$500
7 Julie Bartholomew, Habitat 2
with bees, 2022 Photomedia
$300
4 Julie Bartholomew, Prototype
for Habitat 3, 2022 Earthenware
clay, terra sigillata surface
$500
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8 Julie Bartholomew,
Honeycombing 10, 2022
Earthenware clay, terra sigillata
surface and honey glaze
$1,500
12 Mahala Hill, Mutated Hive
II, 2022 Bone China, Glass, Glaze,
Porcelain
NFS
9 Julie Bartholomew,
Honeycombing 11, 2022
Earthenware clay, terra sigillata
surface and honey glaze
$1,500
13 Mahala Hill, Mutated Hive
III, 2022 Bone China, Glass, Glaze,
Porcelain
$910
10 Julie Bartholomew,
Honeycombing 12, 2022
Earthenware clay, terra sigillata
surface and honey glaze
$1,500
14 Mahala Hill, Plastic Disease I,
2022 Bone China, Glaze, Black Clay
$1,950
11 Mahala Hill, Mutated Hive,
2022 Bone China, Powder coated
metal $1050
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List of works
15 Mahala Hill, Plastic Disease II,
2022 Bone China, Glaze, Black Clay
$1,850
19 Mahala Hill, Corrupted
Growth II, 2022 Bone China,
Glaze, Porcelain
$2,100
16 Mahala Hill, Plastic Disease III,
2022 Bone China, Glaze, Black Clay
$1,790
20 Mahala Hill, Corrupted
Growth III, 2022 Bone China,
Glaze, Black Clay
$2,200
17 Mahala Hill, Plastic Disease IV,
2022 Bone China, Glaze, Porcelain
$1,790
18 Mahala Hill, Corrupted Growth
I, 2022 Bone China, Glaze, Black
Clay
$1,450
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