ARTIST RECEPTION: Saturday, November 15, 2–5 PM
In Turning Toward, Donna Green’s first exhibition with Seven Sisters, the artist presents recent ceramics and paintings that extend her exploration of material transformation into vivid, elemental terrains—where the ritual of making and the discovery of color converge.
Across sculpture and surface, Green’s practice balances intuition and control—volumes that seem to defy gravity, hovering between form and collapse. Her glazed stoneware sculptures move between states of matter: molten black to chalky white, metallic bronze to underglazed yellow or ultramarine. They rise as totemic stacks or erupt into cloudlike masses, their surfaces sometimes blistered or ruptured mid-creation, arrested in the act of geological transformation.
Clay and glaze respond with their own temperaments—buckling, slipping, pooling—so that making becomes a dialogue. She works at the threshold where structure gives way to chance, where gesture becomes decision. The resulting forms carry a sensuous and corporeal immediacy: alive to the tension between intention and surrender. The traces of her touch remain visible—thumb-pressed hollows, ridged seams, surfaces that feel tensile, like muscle drawn over bone. Each form feels at once constructed and discovered, its final state determined as much by heat and gravity as by the artist’s hand.
That same energy carries into her paintings. Using oil stick on paper or poured enamel, Green extends the language of touch into pure motion—drawing as continuation rather than depiction. Pigment accumulates through touch and time; the marks loop, stutter, and repeat with the same bodily rhythm that drives her coiling and stacking of clay. In both practices, the body is the instrument through which material thinks.
The theme of chance intimacy recurs throughout the exhibition. Turning Toward can be read as a nod to wheel work, but also as an embrace of change itself—of growth through resistance and the quiet optimism of transformation. Across these works, play becomes philosophy: each act of making holds within it the possibility of undoing, and of beginning again.
Donna Green (Australian, b. 1960) holds a BA in Industrial Design from the Sydney College of the Arts (1984) and relocated to New York in 1985, where she worked as an editor at Industrial Design Magazine before turning fully to studio practice. She began working in clay in 1988, studying at Greenwich House Pottery and The New School in New York, and later at the National Art School in Sydney (1997). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Hostler Burrows (New York / Los Angeles), HB381 Gallery (New York), McClain Gallery (Houston), and Utopia Art Sydney, among others, and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (Sydney) and the Lieber Collection (East Hampton, NY).
Green draws on ceramic traditions from the ancient Jōmon of Japan to Chinese Han storage jars and scholars’ rocks (gonshi), grounding her work in a study of natural and cultural transformation. As Donna Green said in Ceramics Now, “The work is my body, torso, fingers, elbows, chin. The work has no function; it only relates to my own self physically and psychologically. I have released myself of all the previous boundaries, yet there is still a vessel.” Her forms, Greenwich House Pottery notes, are “reminiscent of cast bronze, comprised of the swells and depressions that are more often the purview of metal than clay.”
Green lives and works in New York and Sydney.
