Caitlin Osborne

Caitlin is a potter making mostly wheel-thrown functional ware, with some hand-built and sculptural work. Her recent focus has been on wood-firing, glaze chemistry, and testing locally foraged materials to incorporate into her work. Her palette reflects the natural beauty around her with earthy shades and simple colours. She particularly loves the surfaces achieved during wood-firing, and the beauty of the raw clay displayed when utilising unglazed outer surfaces. 

Caitlin believes that attending to the small things and taking joy from them is a big part of finding contentment in life, and having objects with depth to interact with, enhances this. So many of the components of daily rituals and domestic beautification are machine-made, or mass-produced, to counterbalance this, she uses her hands to make intimate, high touch and high sight objects that add depth and brightness to the everyday.

Caitlin pots from the workshop she shares with her partner in Ocean Beach. She fires in her electric kiln at home, and in the wood kilns at the Quarry Art Centre. She values the efficiency of the electric kiln but finds wood-firing adds magic to the process and is especially powerful in transforming clay into objects of meaning.