Amy Middleton

Local Contemporary Art Prize 2026 – Finalist

Image courtesy of the artist.

Amy Middleton | Relics | 2026 | mid-fire clay | 40 x 40cm

Relics is a collection on of palm-sized clay vessels that reflect the smallness of human experience set against natures immensity.

Dark and light clays speak in counterpoint. Dark clay anchors the work to the ocean’s deeper strata, where light dissolves, scale expands, and certainty falls away. Light clay rises like fossil and bone, the colour of forms that have outlasted their own endings. These pieces insist that nothing truly disappears; instead, it compresses, calcifies, and embeds itself within layers of time, evidence that history petrifies rather than perishes.

Inspired by the fractured rock shelves and tidal pools of Point Cartwright, the forms echo pockets of history held within a landscape shaped by erosion and force. Arranged in a rigid grid on the plinth, the vessels suggest humanity’s urge to impose order on the wild, an impulse quietly undone by the organic irregularities of each hand-built form.

Together, they offer a meditation on subtlety, scale, depth, and the fragile stories we place against an endless horizon, stories that, even when shattered, become the ground we walk on tomorrow.