Exhibitions Samantha Dennison Of Ash and Ochre 23rd September 2025 - 18th October 2025

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 deeply attuned to the quiet resonance of objects as vessels of memory and meaning.

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EXHIBITION CELEBRATION

Meet the artist and celebrate with us at the exhibition opening party on Saturday 4 October 2025, 1 - 3pm
RSVP Light refreshments provided. We look forward to seeing you there.

In Of Ash and Ochre, Dennison presents a series of still life oil paintings and ceramic works that speak to her intimate engagement with landscape and the layered connections formed through travel, collection, and making. Site-specific materials — from snakewood ash gathered in the Pilbara to clay dug from the South Coast — are woven into her ceramic process, forming unique glazes and surfaces that echo the terrains from which they came. These handmade vessels, rich with place-based histories, reappear as subjects in her paintings, creating a contemplative loop between material, memory, and representation.

Through this dual practice, Dennison traces the poetic interplay between object and environment — a grounded yet open-hearted meditation on the Australian landscape and the connections it fosters.

READ: AUSTRALIAN ARTS REVIEW

Making my own pots again has reshaped my still life paintings, and developing my own glazes has expanded this practice. In the Pilbara I was encouraged to collect snakewood ash from the firepits, sparking a deeper exploration in using locally found clay and ash to create glazes. Working with local materials and their inherent irregularities has resulted in ceramic vessels as unique as the landscapes and interpersonal connections and collaborations that informed them. These are the vessels I then make paintings of, to convey my experiences within these West Australian landscapes upon which I live and visit.
Artist Statement 2025

Catalogue Essay by Phe Luxford 2025

In Of Ash and Ochre, Kinjarling/Albany-based artist Samantha Dennison presents a quiet, tactile meditation on material, memory, and place. Working across painting and ceramics, Dennison builds a nuanced visual language that honours the land not as a backdrop but as an active collaborator. This latest body of work marks a significant evolution in her practice: her still life paintings now centre on vessels she has shaped and fired herself, using clays and ashes gathered directly from the landscapes that inspire her.

Rooted in her lived experience as a regional artist, educator, potter and parent, Dennison’s work has long explored stillness, intimacy and domestic rhythm. Earlier still lifes featured botanical specimens plucked from her own garden or collected during walks, set in delicate compositions that reflected the textures of home and community. That domestic focus has given way to something more elemental in recent years. The vessels she paints are no longer borrowed; they are of her own making, crafted from earth she has touched and transformed.

The genesis of this shift lies in her recent travels to the Pilbara, where she joined a group of artists on a residency at Cheela Plains Station. Focused on observing and absorbing the terrain during her first trip, it was during a subsequent visit that Dennison felt drawn to gather material samples to take back to her studio. These included ash from burnt snakewood used at their campsites, and a small tub of black, iron-rich clay found at the edge of an eroded exploration site. The glazes she has developed from these raw materials are alchemical and richly unpredictable: deep, lustrous oxide reds, glassy blacks, and subtle tonal shifts brought forth through reduction firing. Complex, experimental, and deeply connected to place this glaze work has become a new pillar of her practice.

Each vessel carries its own story, formed by the variations in clay body, glaze reaction, and the unpredictable atmosphere of the kiln. Some echo the vertical striations and pipe-like forms of Pilbara watering holes, others the colours of cliff faces or earth. These formal qualities are carefully considered not just as objects, but as subjects. Dennison creates her vessels with her painters eye already engaged, shaping forms with broad faces to catch the nuanced light and tonal complexity that populate her paintings.

In her studio, she photographs her vessels arranged in shifting configurations, attuned to the light falling across them at different times of day and year. There is a quietude to these images that recalls the work of Giorgio Morandi through a shared sensitivity to proportion, negative space, and tonal harmony. Yet where Morandi's objects hover in ambiguity, Dennison’s carry a grounded sense of place. These are not just vessels, but artefacts of travel, connection, and transformation.

The paintings that result are pared back and precise, almost abstracted studies in tone and form. Singular native flowers sometimes appear, echoing earlier works but now presented with restraint: detailed, quiet, unshowy. The result is a deeply integrated two-fold practice, where the physical and the pictorial feed one another in an ongoing cycle of observation, making, and re-making. In Of Ash and Ochre, Dennison offers not just representations of objects, but distilled impressions of landscape, process, and presence.

SAMANTHA DENNISON PROFILE
DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

Samantha Dennison
Corymbia ficifolia and Pilbara river vessels 2025
oil on canvas, framed
120cm x 120cm

Samantha Dennison
Hakea Laurina and Kinjarling clay bottles 2025
oil on canvas, framed
120cm x 120cm

Samantha Dennison
Hakea Laurina and Linda's Kinjarling slip bowl 2025
oil on canvas
80cm x 80cm

Samantha Dennison
Cheela Ash Still Life Landscape 2025
oil on canvas
63cm x 100cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Pilbara Ash and Ochre Still Life Landscape 2025
oil on canvas
63cm x 100cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Pilbara vessels and waterhole bowl 2025
oil on board
40cm x 40cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Cheela ash still life 2025
oil on board
40cm x 40cm

Samantha Dennison
Ash and ochre vessels 2025
oil on board
40cm x 40cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Banded iron vessels 2025
oil on canvas
30cm x 30cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Whitegum blossom and Cheela ash vessels 2025
oil on board
30cm x 30cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Shino teabowl, redgum blossom, and Pilbara ash bowl 2025
oil on board
23cm x 30cm

Samantha Dennison
Orange shino and Pilbara ash teabowls with redgum blossom 2025
oil on board
23cm x 30cm

Samantha Dennison
Waterhole bowl and Rachel's Pilbara slip vessel 2025
oil on board
23cm x 30cm framed

Samantha Dennison
Cheela Plains still life landscape 2025
Ceramics, stoneware, ash glaze
20cm x 80cm x 18.5cm

Samantha Dennison
Escarpment vessels 2025
Ceramics, stoneware, ash and wild clay glazes
19cm x 22cm x 18cm

Samantha Dennison
Pilbara red vessels 2025
Ceramics, stoneware
19cm x 24cm x 18cm

Samantha Dennison
Orange earth vessels 2025
Ceramics, stoneware
13cm x 24cm x 9cm

Samantha Dennison
Ochre Hill ash and slip vessels 2025
Ceramics, stoneware, ash glaze and wild clay slip
19cm x 27cm x 10cm

Samantha Dennison
Pilbara ash river vessels 2025
Ceramics, stoneware, wild clay slip
31cm x 21cm x 18cm