Janet DeBoos is currently Honorary Faculty, (previously Emeritus Fellow) of ANU, having headed the Ceramics Workshop at the School of Art there for over fifteen years until 2013. She ran a production pottery, Brindabella Pottery, which ran for almost twenty years and specialised in functional domestic ware. She has been visiting China, working with industry, studio artists and art schools there for over twenty years.
She has written three best-selling books on glaze technology and is represented in many national and international collections , including The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin and Alice Springs, The National Museum of China, Beijing, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, USA, The Musee de Mariemont, Belgium and The Ariana Museum, Switzerland. She was also Australasian and African representative on Council of The International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva for eight years.
Janet DeBoos presents a newly imagined direction in which she erases some of her recognisable motifs from her close connection with China, and sees a future that is local, unfixed and eclectic. It is populated with her memories and draws on her time spent closer to home in 2020 and the Australian bush.
The way in which we develop a sense of place is often predicated on a consistency in the way we experience things. Memories we might have had of playing on endless beaches as kids become corrupted by revisiting that changed seaside village- now become a commercial strip, and in the same way, old friendships become coloured by experience. We can control to some extent the fixedness of memories and beliefs by not revisiting the past, but sometimes we have change foisted on us by external events – like pandemics.
Janet DeBoos 2021
