Fleur Schell is a ceramic artist who resides in Perth, Western Australia. Schell combines porcelain and mixed media to create meaningful narrative-based installations. The themes she references are inspired by Schell’s immediate surroundings and the impact humans have on the natural world. Schell was raised on a farm near the wheatbelt town of Goomalling in Western Australia. Her qualifications include a Diploma of Ceramic Art and Design from the Western Australian School of Art and Design, a degree in Visual Arts from Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, and a First Class Honours Post Graduate in ceramics from the University of Tasmania Australia. Over the past decade, she founded SODA International Ceramic Residency and The Clay House Ceramics Centre to nurture the Ceramic Arts of Western Australia. Fleur’s artistic career has spanned nearly three decades and enabled her to live, work and present in China, Singapore, Finland, Canada, the United States, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom. Her work has been published in numerous books and journals and is represented in private and public collections throughout the world.
Visit Fleur Schell’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Ark Angel, 2020
Making Room for the Wildlife, 2021
My role as an artist is noticing to notice and reinterpret the narratives that deeply move me as I go about our daily rituals. My work is inspired by my two children, who are the muses in my work. As they become more knowing, my work has become more emotive and complex. Their hopes and aspirations motivate me to address many of the current challenges that young people face as a collective today.
I deliberately play with conventions and expectations by including mixed media props, which act as signifiers to contextualize the clay figure. I am drawn to porcelain because it feels as precious as the two muses that inspire me. While my hands pinch, roll, cut and texture the purist of clays, my mind meanders back to them. If you listen closely to the porcelain, it provides endless life lessons, none more important than the way it asks the maker to slow down, care and focus on the details of the parts to achieve a richly detailed and sentimental whole.
