Shaping the Future Through Clay: Mentorship, Memory and the Power of Artistic Exchange
Image credit: Portrait of artist Sofii Belling Harding. Photo: Tiffany Garvie.
Inside the ceramic studio at Yarrabah Arts and Cultural Precinct, located in the coastal Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, Queensland on the Cape Grafton Peninsula, about 50kms southeast of Cairns, knowledge is shared by making, through hands coated in clay and through stories shared across worktables. The making is about cultural continuity.
The Yarrabah Arts and Cultural Precinct has long been synonymous with ceramics. Established in 2002, and building on a pottery tradition that began in the 1970s, it has become a place where generations of artists have shaped clay into vessels, sculptures and richly textured contemporary works. Artists from the Gunggandji and Mandingalbay Yidinji communities draw on the landscapes and waterways around Yarrabah, as well as family histories and cultural knowledge, to create work that is unmistakably of place.
Alongside ceramics, the precinct supports painting, weaving, printmaking and textiles, but clay remains its defining language. The work of artists including Philomena Yeatman, Michelle Yeatman and Christopher Harris has brought national recognition to the studio, demonstrating how technical skill and lived experience can be held within the same object.
Continuing the legacy of collaboration, Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Sofii Belling Harding will debut her new body of ceramic works made during a six-week residency at Yarrabah Arts Centre at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) 2026.
Supported through Creative Australia’s Young People: First Nations Arts & Culture Project Fund, the residency brought Harding into connection with Yarrabah ceramicists and respected Elders Aunty Michelle Yeatman, Aunty Philomena Yeatman and Aunty Edna Ambrym. Working closely alongside the artists throughout May, Harding immersed herself in the rhythms of the studio, developing technical skills while absorbing something far less tangible but infinitely more valuable: the experience of learning within community.
At a time when arts funding conversations are often framed around outputs, audiences and visibility, programs like this quietly remind us that the future of the arts is built through relationships; through mentorship and the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next.
Image credit: Aunty Philomena & Aunty Michelle Yeatman in the studio with Sofii Belling Harding: Aunty Michelle Yeatman and Sofii Belling Harding working on their practices.
For Harding, who belongs to the Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri, KuKu, South Sea and Meriam peoples and has lived on Kulin Country all her life, the residency represented an opportunity not readily available within Melbourne’s First Nations arts landscape.
“Due to the absence of a First Peoples art centre in Melbourne, as well as First Peoples ceramic mentorship opportunities, pursuing my creative passion has been very difficult and oftentimes disheartening,” she shared.
That absence speaks to a broader reality facing many emerging artists working outside established cultural infrastructure. While contemporary First Nations art continues to receive increasing international recognition, access to culturally grounded mentorship remains uneven. Programs that create space for artists to work directly alongside Elders and senior practitioners are therefore not supplementary to the arts ecology, but are essential to its survival.
At Yarrabah, ceramics became a meeting point between generations, geographies and lived experiences. Harding’s project, maya (Curing of Sickness, Yorta Yorta), evolved through conversations around storytelling, process and material memory, while the residency itself became an act of creative and cultural nourishment.
“The feeling of being free to exist, connect and create in the presence of other blackfullas is something I constantly yearn for, and it is also my cultural birthright,” Harding reflected. “When this need was met and nurtured, the difference in my spirit was immeasurable.”
Importantly, the residency was shared alongside Harding’s two-year-old daughter, Dunguludja, another quiet reminder of how artistic knowledge often travels not through formal instruction alone, but through witnessing and proximity, through children growing up surrounded by making, conversation and community.
This intergenerational exchange sits at the heart of many First Nations art centres across Australia, where studios operate not simply as production spaces, but as places of cultural continuity. Knowledge is carried through repetition and routine; through artists sitting together day after day, sharing techniques, histories and stories that cannot be separated from the act of making itself.
For Aunty Michelle Yeatman, Aunty Philomena Yeatman and Aunty Edna Ambrym, mentoring younger artists is inseparable from sustaining culture.
“Passing on knowledge through making is an important part of who we are,” the artists shared. “It was wonderful to share our skills and creative space with Sofii and see her confidence and ideas grow throughout the residency.”
Image credit: Sofii Belling Harding at Yarrabah Arts and Cultural Precinct
That growth will soon become visible to audiences at CIAF 2026, held from July 9 to 12 across Gimuy/Cairns, this year themed Reclamation & Regeneration. Yet beyond the finished works, Harding’s residency points toward something larger unfolding within contemporary First Nations practice: an understanding that thriving arts communities are cultivated collectively.
CIAF Artistic Director Teho Ropeyarn described programs such as Creative Australia’s Young People: First Nations Arts & Culture Project Fund as critical to strengthening sustainable creative futures for emerging artists. Their importance lies not only in supporting individual careers, but in creating ecosystems where artists can continue learning from one another across generations.
And perhaps the real legacy of initiatives such as this are not simply the exhibitions, but the ecology they help to sustain by supporting artists to produce work, learn, connect, be mentored and, eventually, mentor othersh.
In an industry increasingly shaped by speed and visibility, these slower forms of exchange remain among the most valuable tools the arts possesses. They allow culture to move forward without severing itself from memory. They create space for emerging voices to grow while remaining grounded in those who came before them
CIAF 2026
July 9 to 12 2026
Tanks Arts Centre and satellite venues across Gimuy/Cairns
ciaf.com.au
