Talking Clay: Stella Baraklianou

We’re delighted to welcome Stella Baraklianou as the next artist in our Talking Clay series.

📅 Date: Wesnesday, 12th November
🕕 Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM
📍 Location: Throwing Shapes Community Ceramics Studio

About Stella:
Stella Baraklianou is an artist whose work bridges craft, textiles, photography, and sculpture, creating immersive installations that respond to the post-digital era.

Born in Greece and raised in Sydney, Australia, Stella’s practice is shaped by her experiences of travel and migration, layered with multiple cultural references. Recently returning to the material of clay, her sculptural forms and coiled vases pay homage to her Greek heritage. Drawing on classical Grecian shapes, her works are reimagined through contemporary ideas of chance, precarity, and invisible algorithms.

Slanting, leaning, bulging, and hovering, her raw, textured sculptures reflect a sensitivity to shifting surroundings, both real and virtual. As Stella describes:

“My method is based on intuition and using emotions when working with clay. I prefer the freedom of gestural expressiveness to pre-designed sketches, allowing for the process and the material to guide me.”

Stella holds a Practice-based PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, and has taught Contemporary Art and Photography as a Senior Lecturer at several UK institutions, including the University of Huddersfield, Leeds Arts University, and Goldsmiths. Her work has received recognition from Arts Council England and A–N, and has been shortlisted for the Prix Contemporain Céramique (2024) in Belgium.

Join us for this intimate and thought-provoking evening as Stella shares her journey, influences, and intuitive approach to clay and form.