TONI WARBURTON

YOUR LATEST SERIES, ‘MESSAGES FROM THE BAY’, IS a good place to start. Can you tell me about it?

I’m interested in the continuing interaction with place by Indigenous people, as well as the visionary romantics in colonial times. I don’t use the term ‘landscape’ for my work: I prefer to use ‘place’ or talk about the experience of being, because with the Indigenous colonial history here, ‘landscape’ is quite problematic.

A lot of the painting on my latest ceramics has been influenced by my watercolours. In many of the pieces, I’ve been working with the temperate climate colours of sea sponges. I started researching them because I’d read this amazing book by Rebecca Stott called , which is about how Charles Darwin didn’t publish his theory of evolution until he’d done all the hard yakka of zoology based on the barnacle. The most beautiful drawings of barnacles that I’d found online were all drawn by