Joey Burns
Joey is Canberra Potters’ Technical Manager, but also a fantastic potter and teacher in his own right who makes functional and non-functional work and has a passion for wood-firing.
Joey Burns is based near Gundaroo, New South Wales. He first trained in a production factory making pottery before deciding to study, receiving his Diploma Of Ceramics from Northern Beaches TAFE Sydney. After working as a ceramics technical assistant at the Ernabella Art Centre in outback South Australia, he now works from his home studio making functional pottery. Joey has been an assistant teacher for Canberra Potters’ children’s classes since early 2020.
The works Joey makes are simple reflections of his surroundings, whether it be influences taken from the people and cityscapes of the cities he has lived in, places he’s visited, or landscapes from the rural area he grew up and now lives in. He tries to incorporate a sense of character and personality into his pieces, which he gathers from interactions with people, animals and architecture.
The malleable nature of clay allows Joey to spontaneously create abstracted gestures of these visual, tactile and aural influences. He fires his work in wood burning kilns in order to achieve a non-contrived reference to the colours and surface textures from the original inspiration behind the forms.