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Sydney, NSW
Anne Kwasner is an artist who converses with her audience through drawing and ceramics,
Message
Anne Kwasner is an artist who converses with her audience through drawing, upcycled ceramics, clay and installation.
She is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across ceramics, mixed media and drawing. She holds a Master's degree in Ceramics from the National Art School in Sydney, Australia.
Her ceramic pieces, both two and three-dimensional, have developed from drawing and printmaking. She has been exhibiting consistently since 2006, with a strong history of working with independent spaces.
Anne grapples with mythology, identity, family history and loss, exploring the potential of objects and images to act as repositories for both known and unknown pasts. We make myths from our histories and tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the world, or make nonsense of it all.
Her subjects are mined from mythology, migration and observations of daily life. In her imagination, they are all intertwined.
Some recent achievements have been solo exhibitions with Tiliqua Tiliqua Gallery, Sydney and The Sydney Contemporary Works on Paper. Anne will be a resident at the KHB artist Residency, Berlin, September 2025 and Burnt Dirt Residency, Woollongong, Australia.
She has been a finalist in the Perry Drawing Prize, North Queensland Ceramic Art Awards, and Nth Sydney Art Prize. An article was published about my work in The Journal Australian Ceramics, I Come with Baggage, 2020. Anne was awarded the Kil-n-it Ceramics Art Award- Kil-n-it Ceramic Studios- Sydney, 2019
Shoalhaven Contemporary, Maitland, Rookwood Cemetery's Art Prize, Hidden Sculpture art prize and the Hutchins Drawing Prize, Tasmania. I have been a recipient of an Art Start Grant, Australia Council and the Vytlacil Residency in New York (2012). My work is held in private collections both in Australia and abroad.
Statement
Drawing is a process of thought for me and a product. I am always looking for different drawing languages and surfaces. My skill evolves as I explore the use of ceramic material and ceramic paint; onglaze.
Thematically I have two lines of enquiry; I have been exploring exile and the experience of estrangement and separation. My parents, who migrated from Poland, lived through war and then isolation from the rest of the modern world during the communist era. Arrived in Sydney with few objects: photos, a suitcase and a ceramic tea set given as a wedding present.
I have drawn on plates retrieved from opportunity shops as incomplete sets. Metaphorically paralleling émigrés who have lost members of families to war. Incomplete dinnerware is like incomplete families. Through drawing members of my family from old photos, I trace the lines of history with lines of onglaze.
My second line of enquiry has been the relationship of guns to American culture. In contemporary America, the relationship people have to their guns has become a close
alliance between humans and a Christian God, who happens to be white and male. Gun culture sits at the intersection between religion and nationalism. I'm drawn to how the second amendment gives people the right to bear arms, yet people feel a distinct lack of trust when they arm themselves. This becomes a cultural norm for their children. There is a proliferation of photographs of children on the internet holding and playing with guns. The guns are considered educational toys. As young people get older, the photos of gun holders become less ‘wholesome’ and more fetishistic. This is an incongruous combination of imagery that metaphorically describes the inconsistency of American religion and gun culture. In this series, I also have slip-cast toy guns and decorated them.