Jane McKenzie is a Sydney-based artist whose ceramic sculptures find their genesis in Modernist architecture. It is not surprising given McKenzie’s artistic practice is backed by a twenty-year career as an architect.

Turning to a visual language that is anchored in form and geometry, McKenzie is influenced by the buildings of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, and the sculptures of Ruth Duckworth and Isamu Noguchi. She says: ‘The sculptures are not intended to represent buildings, but entice the viewer to look through and around the pieces, and perhaps wonder what it might be like to be inside.’

McKenzie’s work has been included in group exhibitions across regional and metropolitan NSW. Her sculptures were exhibited alongside works by ceramicists from across Australia in Ceramics 2017 at Maunsell Wickes Gallery, Sydney, and included in The Design Files: Open House in Melbourne in late 2017.

McKenzie uses slab-building techniques, turning to terracotta clay for its honesty, along with a restricted palette of white and black glazes or surface finishes that contrast with the clay’s natural colour.

In 2016 McKenzie was selected for a Fremantle Arts Centre studio residency in Western Australia. It followed her being awarded the Muswellbrook Art Prize for Ceramics in 2015. Her work is represented in the Collections of the National Art School and Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre, alongside various private collections.

McKenzie graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art form the National Art School in 2016 and is currently working towards her Master of Fine Art.