$1500   AWARD

in association with Craft Victoria

The Pan Gallery Award has been established to demonstrate excellence in ceramics produced throughout Australia. Pan Gallery supports the creation of ceramic artworks of an innovative nature and seeks to celebrate ceramic traditions as well as provide a forum for artists to challenge the boundaries of contemporary ceramic practice. We encourage the exchange of ideas between artists and a diverse audience and aim to promote public appreciation and understanding of the form.

This years exhibition was entitled BOTTLED 

Ceramic art requires patience, considered decisions and attention to detail. This emphasis on technique raises an important question: Is ceramic art capable of embodying sentiment? BOTTLED seeks to explore the ability of the ceramic object, in this case in the form of the bottle, to express emotion.

The bottle is a practical object: its primary purpose is to function as a vessel that contains the tangible. What happens then, when this tangibility is replaced with the impalpable – such as emotion?  Is the bottle able to contain the fleeting intensity of anger, the all-encompassing feeling of euphoria or the continuous simmering of long term grief? Can a ceramic artist bottle emotion?

Congratulations go to Katie Jacobs, the recipient of the 2009 Pan Gallery Award, for her entry Weeping Willows.

"I lied on a rental application. I said I was an avid gardener because my dream house had a massive and superbly overgrown garden and I wanted to live in it.

These bottles are cast from the remains of two silver birch trees. During the summer before last they died outside the Northcote dream house where I now live. Due to water restrictions I didn’t water them enough, not even with recycled water, and so their death is on my not-so-green thumbs. Casting them is an attempt to honour their memory by making them solid again, except I imagine these porcelain vessels as white lingering ghosts of the former trees, berating me from beyond the grave." Katie Jacobs 2009

Applications have now closed for 2009. Please visit again early in the new year for details regarding the 2010 Pan Gallery Award.