Bling Bling

15 MAY – 14 JUNE 2026

Opening Preview: 6.30pm Thursday 14 May

Bling Bling brings together the work of Canberra region ceramic artists Liz Crowe, Lee Nelms and Jacqui Keogh for a contemporary exploration of decoration and the vessel. Embracing the aesthetic, affectionate, excessive and even derided aspects of bling, the exhibition celebrates spectacle while inviting viewers to consider the deeper cultural, personal and artistic meanings that underpin the works.

Through functional and sculptural forms, surface and character, all three artists explore the vessel as a holder of story, connection and individual expression.

Liz Crowe works with lustres, copper wire, shiny glazes and engobes to explore her love of colour and texture, with touch and the tactile central to her hand-built and wheel-thrown vessels and wall pieces. Lee Nelms walks the tightrope between functional and sculptural, with her colourful and playful forms becoming containers for memory, humour, and vulnerability. Loosely inspired by a mid-century aesthetic, Jacqui Keogh leans into quirkier forms finished with heavy metallic glazes and lustres applied to carved surfaces in repetitive and block patterns that hold the past and the present.

Crowe, Nelms and Keogh met at Old Saint Luke’s Studio in Gundaroo, where a shared commitment to clay sparked an enduring creative friendship — realised here in their first collaborative exhibition.