About fiona and her ART
Fiona Ryan-Clark is a Blue Mountains-based sculptor who creates ceramic figurative sculptures. Her mythical sculptures explore themes of transience and universality, and the need to heed natural and timeless life forces.
Fiona grew up in Sydney and the Hunter Valley, where her family owned a rural property in the wilderness of the Wollombi Valley. This forged a deep love and
appreciation of the Australian bush from an early age.
Fiona pursued a career as a journalist, writer and teacher for almost 30 years, until an illness forced a change, and she finally embraced her creativity as an artist.
On a visit to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, she fell in love with a clay “kosa” sculpture by Pueblo artist Roxanne Swentzell, prompting her to pursue ceramic sculpting.
For extended periods, she studied with American-based Puerto Rican artist Cristina Cordova, and travelled to Italy to study with veteran US artist Adrian Arleo. She would follow this up by learning under UK artist Sharon Griffin, which she continues today.
Fiona Ryan-Clark’s work has been awarded the Main Sculpture Prize in the 2025 Thirroul Art and Seaside Festival, and she has been a finalist in the 2025 Blackheath Art Society Easter Exhibition as well as the 2024 Sculptures at Scratchley in Newcastle.
Her work has been exhibited in commercial galleries and public art shows, including the September Works show in Monte Castello di Vibrio, Italy.
Her work has also been widely exhibited in Katoomba.
Her work is held in various private collections in Australia.
She is represented by Rex-Livingston Art+Objects in Katoomba, Australia.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
My ceramic figures often depict outsiders, or are other-worldly, because the – figures who don’t fit neatly into modernity – evoke curiousity and elucidate overlooked truths about our lives. Shape-shifters, the personifications of natural forces and magicians are common forms for me, and spring from my fascination with the kosa figures of Native North American cultures, as well as other myths and legends.
Their interactions with the natural world reflect my upbringing in Australian bushland and current home in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney.
I hand build my sculptures using clay slabs that are compressed in a slab roller. This technique allows creating the form simultaneously as letting the clay speak through surface and structure. Building hollow forms facilitates a faster process, imparting energy and vitality to the final work, and underlining that both the clay and I play a role in the piece’s creation.
My approaches to surface finishing reject uniformity, deliberately using drips and a range of variations and nuances in colour, patina and reflectiveness. With that, I seek to emphasise the beauty – and inevitability – of forces over which humans have limited control.
My process expresses a moment of life caught like a candid portrait, capturing an expression of personality and emotion, whose truth is not dependant on being observed.
The slab of clay, although deliberately shaped and worked, becomes a metaphor for transience. A brief moment of time where an experience has occurred, which is important in itself to an individual, but paradoxically fleeting and similarly experienced by many others.
With my work, I want to reinforce that we are just passing visitors in an ancient world, promoting the preservation of our natural environments and a reminder of what binds humanity and life forms together.
Although the figures seem to be naive, they carry a wisdom about how to live well in our world. They are not just here to delight and inspire viewers to see the beauty and whimsy in reality, but to shift attention to an implicit experience or emotion to evoke a recognition and affinity in the viewer.