Honor Freeman is a contemporary ceramic artist living and working on the Fleurieu Peninsula, on the traditional lands of the Ngarrindjeri/Ramindjeri people in South Australia. Working primarily in porcelain, her practice draws on the mimetic properties of the material to craft objects that belie their materiality and purpose. Familiar household things are recast in clay, inviting a second look at the overlooked objects that shape our daily lives.
The Patience of Ordinary Things, 2023
Honor’s path to ceramics began in a converted Nissen hut that served as her high school art room. Her art teacher, Rose, was passionate about ceramics and encouraged her to explore and play. “I recall loving the materiality of clay, it completely seduced me. Making made sense to me.”
As a student she pored over the Pottery in Australia journals, where she first encountered Margaret Dodd’s Holden car series, work that struck her then and still does today. The journals also introduced her to JamFactory in Adelaide, which she visited on a high school city excursion. It was that visit, and later her time at art school, that let her dare to imagine a future as a ceramic artist.
Honor studied at the South Australian School of Art when its sprawling studios were still on the Underdale campus in Adelaide’s western suburbs, graduating in 2001. She then spent several years at JamFactory Craft & Design, first as an Associate and later as a Tenant. The studio remains central to her life: “I feel unmoored when I am away from the rhythm of the studio for long stretches.”
Exhibiting since 2000, Honor’s work has been curated into major exhibitions at the MCA, TarraWarra Museum of Art and the Powerhouse. She has undertaken international residencies at Guldagergaard, Denmark’s International Ceramic Research Center, and at Indiana University’s School of Art & Design. In 2006 she travelled to Chile for The South Project, continuing her project on/off/on, clandestinely installing porcelain light switches and power points in public spaces. In 2018 she undertook the Guildhouse Collections Project at the Art Gallery of South Australia, resulting in Ghost Objects, exhibited during the 2019 SALA Festival.
Her work features in publications including the NGV’s 101 Contemporary Australian Artists, Earth & Fire by Kylie and Tiffany Johnson, Louisa Taylor’s Ceramics Masterclass and Glenn Barkley’s Ceramics: An Atlas of Forms. It is held in collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, the Powerhouse and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. In 2023 Honor received an Arts South Australia Fellowship.
“I am hopeful and optimistic about the future of craft because the alternative is otherwise grim,” Honor says. She acknowledges the enormous pressure on the art and craft ecosystem from ongoing funding and education cuts, yet sees artists and makers continuing to create, experiment, explore and learn. She is confident that the independent schools, workshops and studios emerging in response to those cuts, along with the next generation of makers, will keep shaping the community, but stresses that real investment is needed for the sector’s long term survival and growth.
“It’s not going to be easy, but the best things never are. Time is perhaps one of the most precious commodities we have right now, and the crafts especially understand and have always understood the value of time. Material, clay, is a great teacher of this.”
Fond Honor’s work at https://www.instagram.com/honor.freeman/