Streetscapes and Saggar-Firing
03.08.2024 Kate Middeleer
Art lines the walls, there are a number of bodies milling about Bayleaf’s halls, and a few mumbled and overheard ‘excuse me’s’ and ‘nice to see you again’s’. It’s a couple of Tuesdays ago and I’m at the Fletcher Street Cottage Fundraising gallery event, which is raising money to fight Byron’s growing homelessness crisis.
I arrive on my own and the rest of the evening goes as such—as Marley said she would be there by five pm but doesn’t end up making it round until after I’ve left. I’m saved from the small talk that usually accompanies standing alone at a public function full of friendly faces, as my eyes spark on an exhibit lining a small corner and I make my way over. Fronts of houses molded from clay, miniature lamps lighting up intricately crafted doors and copper wiring, cuttings of live plants in their small clay pots. And underneath a plaque that reads:
“The term ‘facade’ refers both to the principal front of a building and to a deceptive outward appearance. This duality resonates deeply with Natalia as she reflects on Byron Bay, often depicted as…”
These are the words of Natalia Torres Negreira, and less than a week later, I’m sitting with her in her studio. A nice chat, as quick as it was, in the sun and surrounded by Clunes farmland. My mind mulls over the thought that while I may have been ditched by one friend (Marley, it’s alright), I might have made something of another.
A surprising amount of repeat customers—“I’m like, how many people could need more cups?” she says.
The other side of Natalia is her personal practice; a compilation of streetscapes, terra cotta light fixtures, saggar-fired vases—entered through a door that leads back to her need for artistic experimentation, which she now leaves unlocked.
“I give myself time to do things that fulfill me. I give myself time—I learned the hard way. Where I became just a full-time production potter,” she explains to me, our eyes on a set of Ruby and Frank mugs waiting to be glazed. “I found balance”.
Whether it be production mugs or other forms of art, her works are always influenced by her Uruguayan heritage. “Ruby and Frank Studio is bright, experimental, colourful—which is my South American heritage. Because people are bright, energetic, and colourful”.
The experimental projects that go alongside her production work are a call back to that heritage as well. “I’m coming back to basics when it comes to an organic, earthy feel. It’s still influenced by my heritage, even though it’s different”.
She gestures to the cluster of vases on the table beside us. ‘This is saggar firing. It’s an ancient technique where you wrap the pieces in organic matter. I’ve used koala dung, steel wool, copper, egg shells, sea-salt—and I’ve wrapped these pieces in that tightly, and fired it at a low temperature in the gas kiln, and they do what’s called ‘flashing’”.
She picks up a pot and spins it in her hands, pointing to the track marks of living matter and the speckling of earthy colours. “That’s the organics speaking to the piece. They’re having a relationship. I’m intrigued by these ancient techniques that have been passed down.”
“I’ve traveled for years, saw a lot of amazing places in South America. The streetscapes for me are keeping those memories alive. The beauty, the culture, the food, the smells. I feel I’m starting to lose all those memories of these precious places, and my experiences, so I’m keeping them alive through making these,” she explains.
Texture, colour, the history of the creator’s hand embedded in a work—is, unsurprisingly, a through-line for our conversation and seemingly an anchor in her memories.
“There’s a little place in Uruguay called Colonia del Sacramento. It’s all cobblestone, and they’ve painted on top of paint, on top of paint, on top of paint. So it’s all peeling, and textural. I just love it. It’s one of my favourite places on the planet.”
I ask her to tell me about her old studio in Federal. She tells me it stood beside the tennis courts, and the building was bright blue. She tells me of where she stayed during her travels in South Africa, a place called Bo-Kaap. A Muslim village with houses all a different colour. “Mine was the blue one”.
I ask her to tell me about that time before the Bayleaf gallery, before the two hundred-something production mugs, before the koala dung vases.
It wasn’t until years later, around eight years ago, Natalia went to Uruguay to visit her parents. She was at crossroads with a newborn, sitting in a small apartment, looking at her mother’s ceramic creations filling the space. ‘Oh my god,’ she thought. ‘You made that!’
“And she toddled off to the bedroom, and she toddled back with her Tafe notes, that she had taken over to South America. I thought, it’s amazing, maybe I’ll give it a go”. And so while she was over there she enrolled in an eight week throwing course in Byron at the Byron School of Clay. “I was terrible at it, but it got me tasting, and then I started hand-building, and then I got serious and did the diploma,” she says. “And I did it again, because I could, because I love it”.
I don’t ask her if the path into career-ceramics is an easy one, because, seeing the sheer quantity of work around her studio, in its various stages, I already know that answer. I don’t ask--as the pieces lying in batches are evidence of meticulous planning-- but people do:
‘Is it hard? Do you think I could make a business out of it?’
“And my answer is, ‘yes, it’s hard. You gotta work hard’.
But the Northern Rivers is host to a supportive community of ceramicists. “There are so many in this area, it’s almost like massage therapists”. What the area has in numbers, it lacks in competition—“we have great friendships, everyone is really supportive of each other”.
Alongside galleries and her work with Ruby and Frank Studio, Natalia is a teacher at the Tafe in Lismore, where she instructs her students in the ins and outs of ceramics, as well as some of her own hard-won lessons. She also has a pop-up next to Pack Gallery in Byron through the ninth of August. And join her at her studio for the North Coast Mud Trail the seventeenth and eighteenth of August. Hers will be one of many studios joining in in this year’s bar-crawl-but-it’s-not-booze-it’s-ceramics: a weekend of demonstrations, workshops, artist talks, and pottery sales.