Joana Partyka is a ceramic artist and political staffer based in Perth, WA. Primarily working with a coil-building technique, Joana fires each piece up to six times in order to achieve her desired glaze effect. Joana’s work is deeply informed by the political context and attempts to push the boundaries of the ceramic medium, layering her work with both textural glazes and evocative, politically driven titles.
What medium(s) do you work with, and why have you chosen them?
I work with clay, and at the risk of sounding very cliched I feel that it chose me, or perhaps more accurately that I didn’t really have any say in the matter.
I find working with ceramics almost a form of self-flagellation. At times I really hate it but I feel compelled to do it. It involves a lot of patience, which I am not very good at. You form a picture in your mind of what this thing will look like when it’s finished, but you have to completely relinquish control of it at multiple stages throughout the process. You often end up with shattered expectations because there’s no way of knowing if what you’ve made is good until it’s done. It’s simultaneously magical and heartbreaking, and I think that’s why I'm drawn to it.
Who or what are the biggest influences in your work?
The single biggest influence on my work is my mental and emotional state, which in turn is influenced by whatever heinous shit the Morrison government is getting up to.
I also draw a lot of influence from things like space imagery, Landsat images and details in nature. I’m drawn to the ultra micro – like close-ups of wave patterns in the Swan River near my house – and the ultra macro, like satellite photography of the earth.
I also notice that when I’m reading speculative science fiction like Le Guin it kinda seeps into my work. It’s a big melange of disparate things that in my mind all fit together, which I think goes some way to explaining my aesthetic.
How do you consider your audience when you are making an artwork?
I used to think about audience a lot maybe a year or two ago, and I felt so deeply disconnected from what I was making. When I decided in a bit of a fit of rage that I was bored with what I was making is when my current style emerged. I didn’t expect anyone to like it but was really pleasantly surprised when people started to connect with it. The funny thing is when I didn’t have much of an audience I exhausted myself thinking about it, and now that I have an actual audience I don’t consider it all during the making process.
How has your practice changed in the last 12 months?
It’s completely transformed. Around the time of the bushfires and then rolling into the start of the pandemic, I had so much despair and rage bubbling inside me that I didn’t know what to do with. I’ve always been very politically aware but late 2019/early 2020 was some next-level bullshit that’s only snowballed as time has gone on.
It sounds a bit trite but I’ve channelled that into my ceramics practice. I use a method I’ve joking/not jokingly dubbed ‘rage-building’, because when I’m working I carry my rage right at the surface; it comes through in the wonky forms and textured surfaces. It’s almost as though being that angry about what’s going on in the world has just made me go ‘fuck it, who cares’.
When I look at my work over the past year I can see exactly what was going on in my life and the world, and how I felt about it. A curator friend of mine described it recently as a “warped calendar” and I really love that.
What is an essential, touchstone artwork for you––one favourite work from art history that you would love to have on your wall/in your life? Why this one?
I don’t know if I can pick one artwork specifically but I can pick an artist: Joan Miró. I’ve been enamoured by Miró’s work since I was a teenager - the bright use of colour, the bold shapes, the movement and energy, the surreal playfulness, the abandonment of convention. I’d be super happy to have any of his pieces hanging in my house.