Onela Yalda
Fairvale High School
THE BRIGHT UNKNOWN
Ceramics
Clay, glazes, watercolour
My body of work is inspired by Shaun Tan, detailed botanical drawings, and strange monster plants I found online. Using clay, glaze and watercolour I built sculptures that convey a dream-like state - bright creatures that are half-plant and half-monster. I used strong colours - greens, blues, reds and yellows - with the intention of making each form appear to have come from another world, full of mystery and energy, alive and ready to move. The Bright Unknown represents a place where nature is wild, colourful and unexpected, inviting audiences to experience a world that is strange but full of life and imagination.
My artmaking practice has been influenced by the study and interpretation of the following artists: Shaun Tan, ARTEXPRESS, botanical artists.
Marker's Commentary
This exuberant yet slightly menacing body of work consists of hand-built ceramic forms ranging from small, clustered growths to a dominant serpentine centrepiece. Carefully arranged as a colony, the individual pieces cluster, lean and gesture toward one another, creating a shared habitat alive with implied movement. The title, The Bright Unknown suggests a world just beyond perception; swaying tendrils and coiling forms seem poised to animate the moment the audience looks away.
Built through coiling and pinching, the forms achieve a varied surface language of high and low relief, spiked protrusions and trailed textures. Gaping mouths, curling tentacles and spiked blooms sit alongside soft anemone-like structures, producing an unsettling tension between the sinister and the delicate. A vibrant, high-saturation palette of cobalt, magenta and acid green evokes the heightened, almost hallucinatory colouration of coral reef organisms where colour simultaneously signals attraction and warning. Underglaze and watercolour have been layered to build chromatic intensity, amplifying the work's underlying sense of danger.
The Bright Unknown engages with biodiversity, predation and ecological fragility, drawing attention to marine life forms that remain largely invisible to humans. In their hybridity and uncanny humour, the invented creatures invite comparison with Australian artist Jenny Orchard, who shares a fascination with organisms that are simultaneously familiar and deeply strange.