Chinaclay

Chinaclay is a Clovelly store selling handmade ceramic art and pottery, owned and operated by Local potter Cath Fogarty.

Chinaclay allows Fogarty the luxury of cherry-picking other potters’ work. “Some of the people I have here are Australia’s best and then there are emerging potters as well. A lot of them I know personally, but now I’m starting to gather other people who I have admired from afar.”

Artists whose work fills Chinaclay’s shelves include Sandy Lockwood (one of Australia’s top ceramicists) and Susan Frost (the resident ceramic artist at the Jam Factory in Adelaide). “Her work is just so beautiful,” enthuses Fogarty of Frost. “Her thing is colour, so she creates a beautiful colour palette which runs through her work, which is really different to Sandy Lockwood, whose specialty is salt-glazed wood-firing.”

Another artist featured at Chinaclay is Penny Evans, an Aboriginal artist from Lismore and a Sydney College of the Arts alumni, whose work “has a distinct connection to her Aboriginal heritage”.

Fogarty points to the rise in collaboration between different kinds of artisans, such as ceramicists and designers. Hungarian-Australian artist Szilvia Gyorgy, for example, makes “beautiful lights” from porcelain. “With interior design, there’s a lot of interest in people from different areas making functional things like lights,” says Fogarty.

“There’s a real range of work in the shop,” she continues. “That’s my aim really: to have a shop that profiles the finest handmade ceramics made by Australian potters and ceramic artists.”