Ceramics & Sauce Day

In my quest to continue learning new skills to incorporate into my art, I have been hand building ceramics. This, I have discovered requires huge amounts of patience. This is not my strong point, so it turns out this is another new skill I am honing whilst also learning the hand building.

As part of a larger project exploring memory, identity and taking up space , I am making ceramic pieces that tell the stories of my family’s migration experiences. Sauce Day, is a piece marking the annual tradition in Italian families of making pasta sauce (passata) for the year. We made it in our family every summer. My Nonna’s backyard was covered in tarpaulin topped with a sea of over ripe tomatoes (the smell so strong I couldn’t eat fresh tomatoes until I was about 20 years old), a station for the vats of cooked tomatoes, a station for pulping of the tomatoes, an assembly line for funneling the pulped tomatoes into a brown VB long bottle and before clamping down a bottle top, adding a few leaves of fresh basil.

It was a pretty special tradition. One, which when you are a young kid in Australia whose friends did not have to spend their weekend making sauce and this was another embarrassing non-Aussie thing to do, was taken for granted by said young kid at the time. Hoping leaving this vessel - a recreation of the long neck VB bottles of beer used on sauce days - will make up for it and leave an art-based reminder of the importance of the coming together and traditions around food.