Fiona Jack & Courtney Sina Meredith: Earth Posters

Earth posters is the first presentation of a collaboration between writer Courtney Sina Meredith and artist Fiona Jack. The result is a merging of text and clay that captures an exchange between friends, and a moment in time.

Starting in lockdown, Meredith would regularly send Jack worded snapshots of her everyday life, expressing her love of language and people. She offered words to be shaped by Jack, and alchemised in wood, gas and electric kilns. Some words became life rafts, carved into clay to carry the mind where the body could not. And some were purely for play and comfort.
Posters have long been a core component of Jack's practice. Their temporal, urgent and inexpensive form allows for a direct dialogue between people and their urban environment. Where paper is ephemeral, these posters made of earth solidify words written in a period of frustrating joy and joyful frustration.

Based in Avondale, Jack has a history of making artworks for public space, also using billboards and banners to present text works that respond to their context. In the past decade Jack has also developed a pottery practice. Shaping clay and vitrifying it through the heat of a wood-fuelled fire is a process rooted in community, social history and the earth.

Also based in Avondale, Meredith is a distinguished cultural leader and author whose work delves into issues such as racism, sexism and poverty and draw on her Sāmoan roots. Her love of language has taken her from writing childhood rhymes in Glen Innes, to being cited by the Guardian as a future Booker Prize winner. In 2016, Meredith was awarded the lifetime title of Honorary Fellow in Writing by the University of Iowa. Her deeply fulfilling collaboration with Jack explores language and making, daily life and kindred friendship.

26 November 2022 – 5 March 2023

Image credit: Fiona Jack & Courtney Sina Meredith, There Goes Another, 2022. Image courtesy of the artists and Te Uru. By Darren Harkness.