Image: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
The Art Gallery of Western Australia is presenting ‘Baked Goods’, a display of ceramic works from its State Art Collection that examines how objects move between utility, design and art. The exhibition is on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth from 1 September 2026 through 4 July 2027, and admission is free.
Curated by Karl Sagrabb, AGWA’s Associate Curator of Historical Art, the display brings together examples of mid-twentieth-century studio pottery with more conceptual ceramic practices from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than treating ceramics as a single, stable category, the exhibition considers the ways objects are classified and asks where use ends and art begins.
The earlier studio-pottery tradition represented in the display emphasised the relationship between utility and beauty. Alongside these functional approaches, later works demonstrate how ceramic artists expanded the medium’s conceptual possibilities, using vessels and sculptural forms to explore material, perception and systems of exchange.
Artists represented include Eileen Keys, Col Levy, Gwyn Hanssen Piggott and Peter Cooley, among many others. The selection also includes works by Kirsten Coelho, Bela Kotai, Catherine Opie, Prue Venables and Bernard Leach. The gallery describes the works as demonstrating a sustained engagement with local materiality and with the networks through which handmade ceramics are produced, circulated and consumed.
Among the works identified on the exhibition page are Hanssen Piggott’s ‘Still life with blue cup’ (1997), made from Limoges porcelain, and Cooley’s ‘Black swan with Cygnet’ (2012), an earthenware work measuring 52 by 44 by 44 centimetres. Other featured pieces include Jacob Ogden Smith’s ‘Hovea Pottery Ale Bottles’ (2012), Heather McSwain’s ‘Mother and Child’ (dated c. 1957–1982), Coelho’s ‘Ginger jar’ (2010), and a stoneware vase by Leach dated c. 1959–1960.
Sagrabb frames the display through the tension between the intimate scale of handmade objects and the larger systems that shape their production and circulation. The exhibition page connects ceramics with the “macro and the micro,” as well as with the contrast between an object’s exterior appearance and its withheld interior. This approach places familiar forms—bottles, jars, vases and vessels—in dialogue with contemporary questions about aesthetics, function and consumption.
‘Baked Goods’ forms part of AGWA’s programme of collection-based displays at its Perth Cultural Centre site. The gallery is open from 10am to 5pm daily, except on Good Friday and Christmas Day. The exhibition remains free to visit until 4 July 2027.
