Alta Forma presents: ‘Out of the Ordinary’, Goosullae Kim, Pauline Meade and Thannie Phan, 2025
22 November - 20 December, 2025
Recognising the unexpected in the everyday…
Alta Forma is delighted to present Out of the Ordinary featuring new works by Naarm based ceramic artists Goosullae Kim, Pauline Meade and Thannie Phan. Coming from diverse experiences, the artists met and became colleagues while studying and extending their ceramic practices at SoCa, the School of Clay and Arts in Brunswick. This project takes an infamous anecdote concerning North American violinist and conductor Joshua Bell as a starting point from which to explore ideas of perception and value within the context of object based practice. Out of the Ordinary opening celebration 2-4pm Saturday 22 November. All welcome.
About the project:
‘On January 12, 2007, Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell played incognito as a busker in the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C for 45 minutes. Only 7 people stopped to listen, 1 recognised him and by the end he had earned 32 dollars total.
In the subway, Bell's performance was stripped of the traditional cues that signal artistic value: the concert hall, the attentive audience, the evening attire. Without these markers, the music dissolved into the everyday setting, indistinguishable from the noise of the station.
The gallery, unlike the station, is defined by its familiar markers: white walls, calibrated light, the suspension of time. A place were design centres on elevation. What's introduced here, is conferred status and demands attention. But the same object, displaced in a cluttered room, or on a crowded street, can become invisible, and can cease to be art at all.
Out of the Ordinary, examines the interplay between object and environment. Do we see the artwork for what it is, or do we rely on surrounding signals to understand it? Situating artworks in familiar and unexpected settings, this project acknowledges the ways context shapes perception. It asks: what is it we value? What do we notice? And whether we recognise the unexpected when it is placed quietly within the everyday’, Thannie Phan, 2025.
About the artists:
Goosullae Kim is a Korean-Australian ceramist. Hand builds and wheel throws, wanting to let go of control in making, yet evidently having control over the clay, trying to find balance between. Honouring the process of making that is within the nature of the material. Goosullae sees the interconnectedness of being and the non-dualistic view of things, present in the ephemeral of time. Goosullae has been working as a studio hand and an assistant teacher at SoCA (School of Clay and Art in Brunswick) since 2022. Recent exhibitions include, in 2024, HELD, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Here there and here again, Stockroom, Kyneton and Poetry of material things, Residents Gallery, Monsalvat.
Pauline Meade has been using clay as her chosen medium since completing a Diploma of Ceramics at Box Hill TAFE in 2007 and continued to extend her practice at the School of Clay and Art (SOCA). She predominantly hand builds her sculptural and functional pieces layering glazes, oxides and engobes that reflect on her landscape in the Pyrenees region of Victoria. She has exhibited widely in Melbourne and Regional Victoria recent exhibitions include: Here there and here again, Stockroom, Kyneton and Poetry of material things, Residents Gallery, Monsalvat, both in 2024, and Hold/Find, SAGA, Brunswick, 2025.
Thannie Phan is the ceramic artist behind the practice gốm maker. Formed within the tradition of Vietnamese hand-coiling and pinching, then developed away from its convention, her practice articulates a distinctly contemporary ceramic language. Shaped by narratives of place, memory, people and their imprints, the work occupies an ambivalent space poised between permanence and transience. Recent exhibitions include: HELD, Manly Art Gallery & Museum and as a finalist in the Omnia Art Prize (both in 2024), and Three Makers You Should Know, Craft Victoria, in 2025.