We are very excited to welcome Ebony Russell to Boom for her first solo exhibition with us, Where Gods Grow.

Ebony is a dynamic and prolific sculptural artist who has an impressive exhibition history, both across Australia and internationally. Her work is highly collectible and is held in many significant private and public collections. We are thrilled to have her incredible pieces at Boom. 

ARTIST STATEMENT 

Where Gods Grow brings together a collection of small planters and vessels inspired by the mythic worlds of Greek and Roman storytelling. Drawing on a recent residency in Sicily at Salemi Ceramics, each piece incorporates cast faces taken from Sicilian garden sculptures and fountains, emerging through lush, decorative surfaces—suggesting gods, goddesses, and garden spirits nestled within the everyday. Designed for indoor plants, these works bring the garden inside, transforming interior spaces into intimate sites of quiet magic, where care, growth, and the presence of the divine unfold together.

This exhibition marks a full circle moment for Ebony Russell, who grew up in the local area of Colac and has spent the past 25 years developing her practice as a ceramic artist and exploring her artistic voice. She now returns to her hometown region to exhibit at BOOM, bringing her work back into the landscape and community that first shaped her.

Ebony Russell works with porcelain using a slow, physically demanding process of piping clay by hand into dense, continuous layers. This method—borrowed from cake decoration and other domestic craft traditions—allows ornament to function not as surface embellishment but as structure. Each work is built without armatures or moulds, relying on repetition, gravity, and accumulated pressure to hold itself upright.
 

Russell’s practice is driven by a sustained interest in labour that is historically feminised and undervalued: decorative work, domestic skill, patience, and excess. By pushing porcelain to its technical limits, she treats fragility and control as productive tensions rather than flaws. Collapse, wobble, and ornamentation are not risks to be hidden, but conditions that shape the final form.

Her sculptures deliberately resist the modernist separation between decoration and architecture. Pattern becomes load-bearing; excess becomes necessary. Drawing on traditions of ceramic display, cake piping, and ornamental craft, Russell’s work reclaims decoration as a site of authority, pleasure, and structural intelligence—one that refuses to be dismissed as merely superficial.

BIO

Ebony Russell is an Australian artist working primarily with porcelain. Her practice centres on highly labour-intensive, hand-piped ceramic forms that draw on traditions of domestic craft and ornamental decoration. Russell has exhibited internationally, including at Homo Faber, Venice; Art Miami; London Collect; and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. She is the winner of the Brookfield Properties Craft Award 2025 and the Jingdezhen Art Prize (Emerging Artist, 2025), and has also received major recognition in her field including the Franz International Rising Star Award and the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize. Russell lives and works in Australia.