Hannah Barclay teaches her students the golden rules of ceramics by day, then goes ahead and breaks them all when no one's around at night.
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With her creative space doubling as her workplace, the evidence of Barclay's rogue ways with clay is there for all to see when her studio Clay Wollongong reopens the next day.
"I basically teach everyone not to do these things and then I turn around and do them," she laughs.
"And then they all go, 'hey, Hannah, what did you make?"
Since January, the Scarborough artist has been making experimental ceramic sculptures for her debut solo exhibition at Keira Street's contemporary art gallery Egg & Dart.
The result is Gone Is the Night, which opened on Friday, May 3, and features around 40 works in a green, black and white palette that push tone, texture and shape to their outer limits.
The name of the show is a nod to the nocturnal hours Barclay's carved out for her own creativity after Clay Wollongong closes each night.
Alone in the studio with her thoughts and a slab of clay, she draws inspiration from deep within herself.
"Sitting in the stillness of the night ... I find it the best time to work," Barclay said.
"I've had a very busy couple of years and I'm just sitting with it and kind of moving through all of that."
Her surrounds may be peaceful, but it's a deeply turbulent time for the clay in her hands as she reflects on recent experiences - "relationship breakdowns, not just romantic, other things".
As a trained production potter, Barclay will often start with small, by-the-book vases, before taking them to the extreme by creating new bulging, oversized versions.
"It's playing with the idea of what I come from and what I do during the day and then manipulating and pushing away those forms and seeing just how far you can push it," she said.
"So when I throw them uniform, I push the walls until they're about to break and then I close them over and make them uniform again."
She then fires each work multiple times, a practice that inevitably leads to cracking, hence the reason she advises her students against it. For Barclay, it's all part of the fun.
"I push more things into them and put them back in the kiln to see what comes out," she said.
Clay-slip, tinted and slathered on extra thick with her hands, pulls away from the body in the kiln and cracks, adding a dry, sandy texture to her sculptures, just as she likes it.
"I'm working with different temperatures; there's some like real nerdy stuff going on," she said of her exploratory process.
"It's a surprise when you see it and you never know what's going to come out of the kiln, as much as you try to control it.
"It's like Christmas every day and then you're like, 'I don't know if I wanted that'."
While most would throw out any broken, 'botched' ceramics, Barclay saves almost everything, giving each of them the name I Tried and I Tried Again.
"Let's go again and see what else could happen," she said.
Hannah Barclay's exhibition runs until May 25. Find out more about Clay Wollongong here.
