Presenting Aiya Dreaming, recipient of the Sabbia Exhibition and Mentorship Prize for National Art School students.
Winner of the 2022 SABBIA Exhibition and Mentorship Award, Aiya has been working and developing her first solo exhibition between her studio in Sydney and during her stay at the Squatters Residency located in regional NSW, earlier in 2026. Majoring in ceramics Aiya graduated in 2022 in a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School. Aiya was the recipient of the N.E. Pethebridge Award at the National Art School Graduate Awards in 2022 and the Winner of the Foundations Mentorship Prize in 2026. Alongside her independent ceramics practice, Aiya has been a hands-on studio assistant to a range of Australian artists including Janet Laurence, as well acting as the artistic director and costume designer for a range of independent films.
‘Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow’ is a collection of ceramic sculptures & drawings that live in the impatient world of working to survive.
Throughout my life, this survival mode has been shaped by the frantic pace of service, tethered to floors of busy restaurants. A life lived in the narrow gaps between tables, where ideas are jotted down in the same breath as a food order. The work used to feel like a necessary tradeoff: make money to make art, two lives running side by side. But somewhere along the way, I realised there was no separating them. They coexist together, and influence each other, whether I like it or not.
This work began in pocketed docket books, constant companions used to take food orders every night. Waiters have a shorthand only we can read (2E1B, XHOFW, DEO, BFN, crispy, egg) and mine grew a second, secret dialect inside it: black line drawings of shapes and objects, hiding between the orders, illegible pictographs to anyone but me. The first small clay canvases are made to embody that same quality as the dockets themselves, orders and drawings together, raw, immediate and instinctive. These scrunched up, tossed away tools, immortalised as stone tablets.
From these drawings, sculptures follow: three-dimensional forms built from the drawn mark. They aren’t exact translations; the line shifts slightly as it becomes form, bending under its own weight. Then the work takes a further step: a second, more refined set of ceramic canvases. The structures collapse back into the plane but as softer impressions, delicately and thoughtfully finished. This echoing of spontaneous expression and considered form building, back and forth in ceramic, mirrors the days of working and creating rotating and bleeding into each other.
Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow is a celebration of that cyclical gesture, repeated three times over: the relentless and the refined, again and again and again.
Aiya Dreaming, 2026
