Ceramics In Focus: Brendan Huntley

Banner image featuring seven brown ceramic goblets, each with a pair of eyes, positioned upside-down on a grey-gradient surface. Text to the right reads: Ceramics in Focus, Brendan Huntley

27 July 2024 – 27 April 2025

Drawing from SAM’s nationally significant collection of ceramic art, Ceramics in Focus takes a deeper look at artists, technique, materiality, and movements.

Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Brendan Huntley playfully references historic ceramic forms to explore the human psyche and what it means to be human, instilling each of his works with individual sensibilities. Huntley approaches his ceramic practice with a belief that the transformative process of sculpting and firing clay involves a transfer of energy, giving each sculpture its own personality.

Huntley’s work has been collected around Australia and the world, including the British Museum in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

Featured image: Brendan Huntley, Untitled (upside-down goblets), 2008, Shepparton Art Museum Collection, purchased, 2010. © Brendan Huntley. Photo: Shepparton Art Museum

Location: SAM Showcase 3, Level 2

SAM operates on the traditional lands of the Yorta Yorta people. The SAM Building, and art museum within it, is located on river country close to the Goulburn River, known as Kaiela to the Yorta Yorta.

SAM recognises the Yorta Yorta as the traditional owners and ongoing custodians of the lands and water of the Country upon which SAM is built, and that sovereignty of this land has never been ceded.