Name: Max Powell
Item: Max Powell
Author: Australian Ceramics

Living in the country the seasons shape and guide us. The basic forces in nature add structure and richness to how we live our lives and have a powerful impact on how we think, feel and respond.

Max Powell grew up in the country, developing a love of the rich diversity of the landscape. His ceramic work represents the artist’s investigation of the elemental tools of design and creation such as form, colour, line and texture. Max layers these elements to create surfaces that give a feeling of the hot dry summers, the frosty winter mornings and the many and varied influences and stories that are drawn from the landscape and mixed into the potter’s clay. The influences of the landscape is omnipresent in the work, seen in each line and texture that evokes images of cracked earth, river beds and silhouettes of vegetation and tree lines in the horizon. The natural colour palate of browns, black, orange and white are also elemental and seem to remain connected to the process of the works making, clay from the earth hardened in fire.

Max Powell studied painting at the National Art School in Sydney before returning to the country to build a house and studio on a bush block near Glen Innes. Inspired by local potters and a childhood fascination with clay he completed further study in ceramics at East Sydney Tech and Monash University, gaining a Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts (Ceramics) and Education. For 30 years Max taught visual arts and ceramics at the New England Institute of TAFE. He has shown his works in various solo shows and is involved in creating community and public art works.

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Max Powell

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