About

Zyanya Earthwalker is a queer ceramic artist based in the Northern Rivers, NSW. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Secondary Education and began her creative career working across traditional and experimental photography. After more than a decade teaching, her practice has returned to the studio, where she now works primarily with clay.

 

Zyanya creates functional ceramic vessels using stained clay and nerikomi techniques, building pattern through the body of each form rather than applying it to the surface. Her work is characterised by earthy palettes, playful abstraction, and a strong emphasis on ergonomics, tactility, and use. Each piece is designed to feel good in the hands and to live comfortably within the rhythms of daily life.

 

Zyanya’s patterns often appear glitchy, marbled, and in motion. Echoing balance and collapse, order and chaos, past and future. Motifs such as spirals, suns, stars, flowers, and wings recur throughout her work as quiet reflections on time, cycles, transformation, and continuity.

 

At the core of Zyanya’s practice is an acceptance of impermanence. She is interested in objects that are lived with rather than preserved — pieces that may chip, stain, soften, and age alongside the people who use them. Wear is not failure, but evidence of life. Her vessels are made to participate in fleeting moments: a mug held each morning, a bowl shared at the centre of a table, oil poured, candles lit. These objects bear witness to routines, gatherings, celebrations, and ordinary days that cannot be repeated.

 

Many of her forms reference ancient amphoras, serving vessels, and ritual containers as an acknowledgement that people have always gathered, shared food, marked time, and cared for one another in the face of impermanence.

 

Zyanya’s connection to clay is both material and mythic. As one of humanity’s most primal substances believed to have cradled the earliest building blocks of life. Clay becomes a bridge between earth and body, origin and becoming. Through shaping it, she seeks to connect us with what we have come from and where we are going.

 

Earth to skin — the remembering begins.