Join artist Jo Norton in the gallery as she leads us through her current exhibition, Fire as Author, at BAMM. The talk begins at 10am. Register your interest here.

Jo Norton is an artist based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, working on Bundjalung Country. Her practice includes small porcelain vessels, stoneware forms, and site-specific installations. Using contemporary forms, she produces a body of work that comes together through two approaches: one developed within her emerging woodfiring practice, and the other through alternative firing techniques. Together, these works tell a shared story through surface, process and material.

Both bodies of work are co-authored by fire.

The six-foot black clay pierced sculptures evoke burnt trees—forms shaped by absence through perforation, charring and loss, where fire acts as a destructive force that reveals as much as it erases.

The small vessels, wood-fired in an anagama kiln for over 100 hours, register a different relationship to flame: fire as a slow, accumulative collaborator, leaving traces of ash, heat and atmosphere over extended time.

Operating at different scales and tempos, fire asserts its agency in both works. The work positions fire not simply as a tool, but as an active participant whose actions—erasure, marking and transformation—convert material processes into records of memory.