But First We Eat

Meet the Artists

• Fluff Corp.

  

  Fluff Corp is the creative partnership of ceramic artists Claire Lehmann and Jia Jia Chen. Using the material’s history to inform their ceramic activities, they aim to promote the connective and social potential of the medium whilst exploring its intimacy and ubiquity in daily life and its relationship to food and design culture.

  Alongside immersive catering events and an object based practice, Fluff Corp has curated exhibitions for Melbourne Design Week, including an exhibition and series of clay baked dinners ‘But First We Eat’ in 2019 and ‘The Talking Ornament’ in 2021, an exhibition which investigated how objects speak and the role of public space and monuments in urban life.

  Fluff Corp. continues to look at new ways of engaging with ceramic materials and the public.Influences include; Peter Greenaway, 1980’s sci-fi set design, 1970’s interior design, Gordon Matta Clark’s FOOD, the writings of M.F.K Fisher, food history, and the work of Marije Vogelzang.

• Jia Jia Chen

  Jia Jia Chen is a ceramic artist working across art, design and food. Her interdisciplinary approach is driven by her interest in exploring the diverse applications of the material through function, decoration and industry within the framework of creative production. Born in China and raised in Australia, her practise draws inspiration from both Eastern and Western aesthetics; merging and reinterpreting iconic symbols into new and personal expressions whilst alluding to its complex history of cultural and economic exchange. She engages with the process of making as a transposing of conscious and unconscious ideas, the internal to the external and the physical to the metaphysical. She frequently works in collaborative projects with creative practitioners from diverse fields, which stems from her desire to explore potentials of cross-industry artistic outcomes. 

  Chen recently graduated with a Master’s of Contemporary Art at VCA and was the recipient of the Art150 Fellowship. She has collaborated with Speak Percussion for Assembly Operation, Sophia Brous for Supersense ‘Festival of the Ecstatic’ and was commissioned by the City of Melbourne for a show at City Gallery called ‘Dream Machine’, the work from that show was acquired into their permanent collection.

• Claire Lehmann

  Claire ceramic practise spans everything from bespoke lighting commissions to product design for commercial clients, curation and exhibition design. Claire has an Arts Degree from Melbourne University with an Art History major. She then studied Electronic Design and Interactive Media (EDIM) at Victoria University and then a Diploma of Ceramics at Holmesglen, TAFE.

   

  Her arts practise has similarly evolved alongside study, shifting from painting, drawing and digital media, to object design, sculpture, lighting design, exhibition design and an interest in relational arts practises.

  Claire’s ceramic lighting stems from an obsession with luminosity, shape, texture, process, weight and material tolerance. Taking cues from industrial design to create delicate domestic objects relates to an interest in challenging the boundaries and assumptions around materiality in object design. After graduating with awards in ceramics in 2017, she was awarded a grant to attend a residency at the European Keramic Work Centre (EKWC) in The Netherlands.