Manuela Serje
Exploring culture through ceramics
The artwork of Manuela Serje is a journey deeply intertwined with her South-American roots, an exploration of the self, the female experience and the play of consciousness in everyday objects. Big bodacious forms that love occupying space and burrow in your subconscious. Anthropomorphic in nature, sometimes an eye or a mouth in a window, a morphing face glancing at or away from you. An ode to the sun and the moon and the forces of nature that we can see and feel.
“I love the stories the expressions tell, the feeling that the objects are alive, looking back at you. The insinuation that nature, and the objects we surround ourselves with, have an energy and consciousness beyond us.”
A desire to create
After leaving Colombia for Canada at the age of nine - and then Canada for Australia when she was twenty - Manuela always felt a desire to create; to keep her hands busy, to fill her spaces with the colours and textures that reminded her of her homeland. Art was a way to express how she felt as a child of two cultures - being a part of both while simultaneously existing in limbo between the two. This form of expression became a way of keeping her identity through the changes, to choose which parts of herself to bring with her and which to leave behind. Ceramics captured her heart and her hands in this exploration.
An approach to life
The intense connection with the elements; earth and water, the wind and fire. The connection to ancestors. The slow, therapeutic process of building up, drying out, and firing. The constant battle between balance, weight, and your own expectations. The reminder to be like the clay, sturdy and strong even under the harshest conditions, or able to break itself down and be wedged into new beginnings. She plays with this tension in her practice, creating otherworldly narratives, windows to elusive ancient moments. Always embodying her own approach to life; playful, curious, ever aware and ever evolving.
Follow her story:
Manuela now shares her practice running ceramics and drawing workshops after having found a hidden joy for teaching she never knew she had. A magic in seeing others get lost in the process of creation and the beauty of camaraderie in circles of learning, the yarns, the spark of connection. Holding space to sit in content, busy silence or to be vulnerable around each other, letting our worries and wanderings spill out on the table and be enveloped by the sweet, ever changing nature of clay.
