Why is place so powerful? Like many others, my ceramics are grounded in place – literally. Growing up in a place where clay was ever-present, Murrumbeena, the home of the Boyd pottery, I have often wondered if my attraction to clay was inevitable. My memories are of living on a rural/suburban edge: of a creek that ran strongly through the back paddocks, of tall eucalypts bent in the wind and of frogs calling all summer. Out in the long dry grass of the summer paddocks, we made houses and imaginary spaces.

Place is truly where we live – we cannot live outside it. In my other life, as a heritage consultant, my work has focused on the social, cultural and spiritual meanings of specific places to those associated with that place. Through this work I have interviewed many people about their ‘places of the heart’ – some places evoke joy, some pain, and many convey deep feelings of connection.

Going to Alice Springs in 2007 as part of developing my final year ceramics project took me back into a landscape that had attracted me since my first accidental visit years before. As I travelled across town each day to the ceramics studio at the Araleun Arts Centre, the Macdonnell ranges stood sentinel, silent and yet rich with story. Filled with caterpillar dreaming. All landscape has a story – or perhaps landscape is story.

On a trip out of Alice we visited Tnorala (Gosse Bluff). This massive formation is a frozen splash created by a ‘celestial body’. Western science says it was a comet – a frozen ball of gases – that crashed here around 142.5 million years ago. Western Arrente people tell the story of the creation time when a group of women were dancing in the Milky Way. A woman puts her baby down beside the dancing ground, asleep in its wooden baby carrier. Slipping off the edge of the dancing ground, the baby and carrier crash to earth. Forever the morning and evening star search for the vanished baby. Creation is ever-present.

Standing at Tnorala, enclosed by its massive walls, I imagine the crash. Learning that the land surface was then 2 kilometres above my head – I am suddenly inside the land in my imagination. From that moment my ceramics became about the process of ‘coming into relationship with a place’ – the processes of experience, learning, witnessing, feeling, sensation.

My final year project was an expression of my coming into relationship with two central Australian landscapes – Tnorala and the gorges and gaps within the Macdonnells. The forms I made were enclosed, the interior and its stories forever hidden from view, reflecting the importance of what is not known but may yet be understood. The desert polish gleams on the surface. The stories may seep out through the cracks. The storyteller’s voice may be the wind.

Now living near Newstead in Central Victoria, the fragility of this dry stony landscape has been shaping my work. Watching local kangaroo clans helped shape my Nurturing Lands series, and the drought breaking rains of 2011 inspired Ground Truth, a gathering of small pieces representing new growth and the preciousness of water in this landscape.

Chris Johnston
http://placesmatter.wordpress.com/