If you ask ceramist and Craft Victoria member Sony to show you her ‘favourite piece’ she may well take you on a short tour of her Melbourne home and open a drawer here, point to a shelf there at one of her ‘happy accidents’. These beautiful pieces that never left Sony because of some minor flaw now fill her wonderfully expressive home. If you’re very lucky she will lead you out the back door, through a leafy garden to the door of her studio. Enter a magical world crammed with images, notebooks (Sony is an avid journal keeper, carefully documenting each firing) and works in progress. Here you get a unique window into the real practice of a working ceramist.

Since graduating from RMIT ceramics in 1978 Sony has been on a continual journey towards the refinement of her signature style. She is well known for her small beakers and bowls (she loves the idea of drinking from an exquisite vessel) as well much larger objects which are coil built and then inlayed and laminated with coloured porcelain and then polished to reveal a silky tactile surface.

No matter what the scale or purpose, be it decorative or useful, each piece is carefully considered and instantly recognisable as a Manning work.

Her technique is quite complex and requires long stretches in the studio when the creative juices are flowing. Sony goes some way in simplifying the process:

“Inlaying, and the way I do it, is basically a concept of layers. Layers of different clays, either white and icy or coloured with metals as they are in the earth. These are applied in slip form or a slice take through in cross section.” Sony sees the possibilities for this technique as endless, with each new block being utterly unique and often surprising.

Her love of the Bush, of the interior both literally and metaphorically, is clearly evident in her work. Sony is fascinated by horizons and it is a long distant one that is represented in the abstracted landscapes that cling to the outer rim of her vessels. These are not landscapes in the literal sense but are reduced to symbols that easily strike a chord of recognition in the viewer. The eucalypt greens, the slate greys, the creamy whites of a hot summer’s sky evoke both a sense of place and memory uniquely Australian in flavour but with a subtlety that begets Sony’s emotional connection to the land. She says, “going into the wilderness, into the mountains is a form of introspection”.

She is currently experimenting with new translucent porcelains. This allows Sony to produce translucent work that reveals the inlaying technique, making their preciousness more apparent.

A small dog like creature appears in each Manning piece—this is her makers mark and it’s always a great pleasure to find it. The life of a ceramist can be a reclusive one. Sony often works from the early morning to well into the night. To combat this isolation, she is part of an informal group of makers who meet on a regular basis in each other studios to ‘talk shop’ and get not just support but constructive criticism from their peers. There is a real attempt at balancing the reclusive life of the artist with the camaraderie between fellow makers. It is no wonder Sony’s work, as does the work of so many Australian ceramists continues to excite and inspire followers of the medium.