Of Ash and Ochre

Catalogue Essay by Phe Luxford 2025
In Of Ash and Ochre, Kinjarling/Albany-based artist Samantha Dennison presents a quiet, tactile meditation on material, memory, and place. Working across painting and ceramics, Dennison builds a nuanced visual language that honours the land not as a backdrop but as an active collaborator. This latest body of work marks a significant evolution in her practice: her still life paintings now centre on vessels she has shaped and fired herself, using clays and ashes gathered directly from the landscapes that inspire her.

Rooted in her lived experience as a regional artist, educator, potter and parent, Dennison’s work has long explored stillness, intimacy and domestic rhythm. Earlier still lifes featured botanical specimens plucked from her own garden or collected during walks, set in delicate compositions that reflected the textures of home and community. That domestic focus has given way to something more elemental in recent years. The vessels she paints are no longer borrowed; they are of her own making, crafted from earth she has touched and transformed.

The genesis of this shift lies in her recent travels to the Pilbara, where she joined a group of artists on a residency at Cheela Plains Station. Focused on observing and absorbing the terrain during her first trip, it was during a subsequent visit that Dennison felt drawn to gather material samples to take back to her studio. These included ash from burnt snakewood used at their campsites, and a small tub of black, iron-rich clay found at the edge of an eroded exploration site. The glazes she has developed from these raw materials are alchemical and richly unpredictable: deep, lustrous oxide reds, glassy blacks, and subtle tonal shifts brought forth through reduction firing. Complex, experimental, and deeply connected to place this glaze work has become a new pillar of her practice.

Each vessel carries its own story, formed by the variations in clay body, glaze reaction, and the unpredictable atmosphere of the kiln. Some echo the vertical striations and pipe-like forms of Pilbara watering holes, others the colours of cliff faces or earth. These formal qualities are carefully considered not just as objects, but as subjects. Dennison creates her vessels with her painters eye already engaged, shaping forms with broad faces to catch the nuanced light and tonal complexity that populate her paintings.

In her studio, she photographs her vessels arranged in shifting configurations, attuned to the light falling across them at different times of day and year. There is a quietude to these images that recalls the work of Giorgio Morandi through a shared sensitivity to proportion, negative space, and tonal harmony. Yet where Morandi's objects hover in ambiguity, Dennison’s carry a grounded sense of place. These are not just vessels, but artefacts of travel, connection, and transformation.

The paintings that result are pared back and precise, almost abstracted studies in tone and form. Singular native flowers sometimes appear, echoing earlier works but now presented with restraint: detailed, quiet, unshowy. The result is a deeply integrated two-fold practice, where the physical and the pictorial feed one another in an ongoing cycle of observation, making, and re-making. In Of Ash and Ochre, Dennison offers not just representations of objects, but distilled impressions of landscape, process, and presence.