Samantha Dennison is an Albany/Kinjarling-based artist working across painting and ceramics to explore themes of stillness, space, and place. Rooted in her lived experience as a regional artist, educator, potter and parent, Dennison’s practice is grounded in the quiet resonance of objects as vessels of memory and meaning. Dennison’s still life paintings centre on vessels she makes using clays and ashes gathered directly from the landscape, forming unique glazes and surfaces that echo the terrains from which they came. 

Statement

In 2024 we watched from our home as a bushfire took hold of the headland across the harbour, the orange glow of the flames moving across the peninsula in the cool evening twilight. A few weeks later, I collected ash from the site and began experimenting with it to make glazes.  Neighbours gave me clay they had dug up from their block when they were burying roadkill. These are the local materials I use to make the ceramics in these paintings; local clay in the vessels and the ash in their glazes, and all are fired in the flames of a gas kiln. The pots stand as still life landscapes, existing as sculptural installations and in paintings, some accompanied by cuttings of endemic plants, inviting us to consider their materiality and, consequently, the inherent qualities of the Kinjarling landscape contained within them.