Intersections

Intersections artist biographies

Janet DeBoos

BIOGRAPHY 

Janet Deboos is an established artist with an international profile as an artist, designer, mentor, writer and teacher who works predominantly in the medium of ceramics. She has exhibited consistently since 1973. Janet likes to tell stories with her ceramics that reference the rich history of the ceramic form, the cultural insinuation of that form and influences upon it. The pot surface for Janet is a canvas to develop rich and complex meanings and she draws from her surroundings of the Australian bush and the cultural intersections she encounter both here and overseas. She enjoys using iconic imagery from the high point of Chinese porcelain decoration (Qing over glaze), colour and line form the deserts of Australia (Ernabella terrasigillata and Australian flora) and the most ancient of techniques from the ceramics lexicon (sgraffito or scratching) to create hybrid pottery works that are both contemporary and timeless, culturally specific and yet borderless. Janet uses the perception of ceramics as functional form or sculptural object and the gap between these two approaches to the medium as a place to insert her very unique works that critique how we perceive value in objects from a cultural perspective.

Janet is a master potter known for her command of glaze technology. She works from her studio in the Brindabella ranges near Wee Jasper, NSW. Janet is an IAC Council Member, (elected September 2012) representing Australia/ New Zealand and South Africa and travels consistently to the USA and China professionally. She is an Emeritus Fellow at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design.

Wendy Teakel 

BIOGRAPHY 

Wendy Teakel is an established artist with a national and international profile known for her sculptural installations, paintings and drawings. She has exhibited continually since 1980. Wendy employs the ancient techniques of sgrafitto and pyrography and elemental forces of erasure, erosion and accumulation to create artworks that speak of time and place. Wendy work captures the enduring and fleeting qualities of landscape and since 1990 she has visited Thailand and Japan regularly bringing their influence to how she understands, utilizes and expresses landscape space visually. Her work engages with an experiential sense of place, through working with Edward Relph’s idea of the existential insider. Strategies for entering into landscapes and becoming part of then include walking, performing, collecting, sitting, reflecting, drawing, photographing and, making back in the studio.

Wendy looks for relationships between humans, animals and their environments and where the balances change through existential knowledge. Patterns and rhythms slowly reveal themselves as she traces and retraces through landscapes to know a place better. She is interested in the idea of boundaries within places and how they are made. The fenced settler experience of land care and farm husbandry or indigenous fire stick farming, hunting and gathering each create boundaries along with the patterns of elemental forces through drought, erosion, soaking rain, searing sun and brittle frosts. The sense of boundary has been heightened through trips to Asia where Wendy is always a visitor rather than an insider and the boundary here is at first overtly cultural. Her interest in Asian culture and philosophy has allowed new insights into the temporal and spatial qualities of environments she engages in Australia.

Wendy works as a freelance artist from her studio at Murrumbateman outside Canberra, Australia. She is an art consultant and an Honorary Visitor at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design.

Cover Image: Wendy Teakel, Inaccessible, 2020. Photo: David Paterson
Image: Wendy Teakel, Earth Basket IV, 2020. Photo: David Paterson