Nineteen Years With Her, Nineteen Years Without: Inside Jenna Catchpole's Conversation With Clay

Walk into Vacant Assembly in West End this week and the first thing you notice isn't a placard or an artist's statement — it's the surfaces. No two pieces in Jenna Catchpole's Her Flame, My Hands are glazed the same way twice, and most of them aren't glazed at all in the conventional sense. What looks like glaze — the depth, the pooling colour, the occasional flash of green or blue — is ash. Wood ash, fused directly onto raw clay over an 80-hour fire that never stops.

"I'm a potter based here in Brisbane," Catchpole says, in the middle of a gallery she's spent the last few days installing. "My mum was a potter, so I've been around ceramics my whole life. The reason my exhibition exists now is very much a legacy that she left."

Catchpole's mother, Jennene, died nearly twenty years ago, when Catchpole was still young. "My mum passed away nearly 20 years ago," she says. "Last year was a mid-point — it had been 19 years with mum, and 19 years without her. So I thought, why not do something in celebration, and create something positive from the negative." That instinct became her first solo exhibition in 2025. This year, Her Flame, My Hands is back for round two — not a one-off tribute, but what Catchpole now intends as an annual fixture.

Learning to throw, again

Her mother taught her plenty growing up, but never the wheel itself. "I never actually got to throw, or learned to throw on the wheel," Catchpole says. "When I hit my mid-20s, I really felt that urge to reconnect with her and clay. I really missed clay." Brisbane's TAFE ceramics programs had been cut by then, so she found her way to Clayschool, the West End studio run by ceramicist Ray Cavill. She's been there fourteen years — first as a student, now also as a teacher.

Most of the work in Her Flame, My Hands is wheel-thrown, though Catchpole hand-builds a portion of it too — including the show's most personal pieces. The trinket dishes near the entrance started as a practical fix: somewhere to put her engagement ring on and off without losing it. The sentinels — tall, eared forms that read as figures as much as vessels — are, in Catchpole's words, "traditionally protectors." The first pair, made last year ahead of her debut solo, she called Mum and Me: two forms fired together in the same kiln, physically stacked on top of each other through the entire process. "They're actually on top of each other," she says, "and then being transformed through the process of wood firing. It is quite spiritual that they're still connected."

Eighty hours, three nights, one kiln

The technique itself is the other half of the story. Catchpole fires exclusively in an anagama-style wood kiln now, a choice she's made deliberately over the last decade. "There's so much risk with wood firing," she says. "It's high risk, high reward" — pieces can topple, stick together, or be lost entirely to a kiln that behaves less like an oven and more like weather.

A single firing runs continuously for around 80 hours, worked in eight-hour shifts by a small rotating team. Catchpole takes the overnight shift — 8pm to 4am, three nights running — feeding a kiln that reaches roughly 1,300 degrees, hotter again in some chambers than others. The timber matters as much as the technique: Catchpole's team fires with Sally Wattle (Acacia salicina), harvested from trees that die naturally around the 15-year mark on a property in the Northern Rivers, then split by hand. "We're so lucky — I think we've got the best wood in Australia," she says. "But you use what you've got access to."

Every mark on the finished pots — the green pooling, the dark streaks, the crystalline "barnacle" texture on her sentinel bottles — comes from that fire and that ash, not from a glaze applied afterward. "Everything has ash on it," Catchpole says, of a set of vessels fired on their sides. "You can see it dripping."

A community built around grief

Her Flame, My Hands arrives on the back of a genuinely strong year for Catchpole. Two of her pieces — Mum and Me: 19 Years With, 19 Years Without and Mum and Me: Forged in the Firebox — were selected as finalists in the North Queensland Ceramic Awards, chosen from 78 works nationally, with the awards exhibition opening 19 September at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in Townsville. She's also been a finalist in the 2026 Infuse Art Prize at Victoria's Ross Creek Gallery, and recently had a pop-up show, Forged in Fire, at Jan Manton Gallery in Teneriffe.

But the exhibition's real subject isn't technique or accolades — it's what she's found the show gives other people permission to talk about. "I think everyone's got some sort of grief journey," she says, "whether it's losing loved ones, or pets, or special people in your life. By having a space where people can actually openly talk about grief... I think that's why these pieces mean so much to the people who buy them. They share your journey."

There's a line she keeps coming back to: "There's a saying that you're only remembered as long as the last person that speaks your name. My mum was only 47 when she passed. So I keep speaking her name, and telling her stories to my family."

The exhibition's opening event on 5 September included a speech from Catchpole's mentor, the Northern Rivers-based wood-fire ceramicist Suvira McDonald, alongside an artist's talk from Catchpole herself.

Her Flame, My Hands runs until Sunday 13 September at Vacant Assembly, West End. Check the gallery's website for current opening hours.