Prue Venables
Prue Venables, Image by Iris Fischer
Prue Venables found her calling somewhere she wasn't looking for it. She was living in London, studying flute, taking in everything the city had to offer, when she came across a flimsy little booklet called Floodlight. It listed every adult education class running across London, a kind of who's who of teachers in every field, mostly funded by the Inner London Education Authority. Classes were so sought after that people queued through the night for a place. Venables picked, among other things, pottery. From her first afternoon at Camden Arts Centre, handbuilding clay because throwing wasn't taught until the second year, she knew she had found what she'd been searching for. That was 1977, and the feeling never left her.
She had already completed a science degree, a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Melbourne, before that London detour reset her direction entirely. She went on to earn a Distinction in the Harrow Diploma of Studio Pottery at Harrow College of Art, worked as a gallery assistant at Contemporary Applied Arts in London, and later completed a Master of Fine Art in Ceramics at RMIT University. She built studio practices first in London, then Melbourne, and now works from Castlemaine, Victoria.
Image by Fred Kroh
Nearly five decades on, Venables is one of Australia's most respected ceramicists, working chiefly in porcelain. Her forms are spare and considered: handles and lips carrying small, deliberate exaggerations, compositions she has compared to musical harmony, all resolving into what the late Gwyn Hanssen Pigott described as "a final deceptive simplicity, combining stillness with a sense of risk and fragility”. Her work sits in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and museums across the UK, US and Japan. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics, and a former president of Craft Victoria. In 2018 the Australian Design Centre named her its ninth Living Treasure, Master of Australian Craft.
Prue was a finalist in the Loewe Craft Prize in New York in 2023, where the judges stated that “the yielding flexibility of the soft Limoges porcelain is deftly manipulated, the circular body becoming a gently twisted shape with opposing geometry. As the original form vanishes, the vessel becomes a testament to the power of process to absorb exploration, enquiry and risk, culminating in something unflinchingly new”.
Despite the well documented pressures on formal art school training in Australia, Venables is optimistic about what comes next. She points to independent schools such as Slow Clay, Melbourne Clay and SOCA, a relaunching Sturt Craft Centre, and mentors like Amy Kennedy helping artists build sustainable careers. "It is fertile ground," she says, "gaining all the time as a necessary part of a healthy life."
See more about Prue’s work https://www.instagram.com/prueven/