Stoneware with glaze

Signed on the back.

The practise of the dérive, an unpurposeful wandering through an urban environment, informed this study of the psychogeography of White Bay, Rozelle. The architectural structure of the sculpture is directly borrowed from White Bay Power Station, a coal station decommissioned in 1984, and reimagined on top of a precarious landscape. The structural balance of the sculptural base reflects the tension of the area. A huge unused site, White Bay Power Station has had 40 proposals for development since decommission and its disuse stands at odds to the high density of its surroundings. Simultaneously, it appears as a grand monument to history; a church to old industry - holding the possibility of development alongside the beauty of conservation. There’s further tension within the reverence of heritage itself; the knowledge of the industrial history of Sydney as a thin and rosetinted veneer over 65 thousand years of Indigenous inhabitancy. Nearby to the power station is a long mine-blasted sandstone cliff, referenced in the rocky texture and earthy palette of White Bay. I imbue these rocks with the psychic quality of memory, imagining they see far beyond the temporality of industrial development, and seek to distil this quality in the ceramic-rock of 'White Bay'.