Jade Power is a Naarm/Melbourne based emerging artists practicing primarily in the expanded field of ceramics. Power’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with material and the quiet, yet rigorous labour of making. Working primarily with porcelain, she approaches creative practice as a space where control yields to collaboration.
This practice-led research project explores the entangled and symbiotic relationship between creative control and material agency to foster uncertainty as a creative force. It investigates how engaging deeply with ceramic materials through the methodologies of embodied knowledge, iterative material experimentation, and collaborative ‘making with’ can serve as a subversive strategy encouraging alternative ways of knowing, making, and being in the world that challenge ideas of mastery. In doing so, the research recognises the clay, kiln, and environment as active collaborators, drawing on Posthumanist and New Materialist frameworks that question anthropocentric notions of authorship. The study also highlights the blurring of the fragile boundaries between craft and contemporary art, intention and emergence, authorship and co-agency. Here, the method of time and labour-intensive processes plays a key role. Instead of pursuing a pre-conceived vision, the research engages with an open-ended inquiry where transformation occurs through sustained, physical engagement with materials and processes. Ultimately, this research proposes a way of working that values process-led outcomes over fixed or predetermined results.
