Elisa Scarton: It was exciting to celebrate your award win for the 2025 Rigg Design Prize, which focuses on artists aged thirty-five and under. You started your practice in 2021. How did you first get into ceramics?
Alfred Lowe: I did the classic ‘quit-your-job thing’ during COVID-19 and went back to university. The old APY Studio in Adelaide was near my campus, and I would visit my friend, the multidisciplinary artist Zaachariaha Fielding, during my breaks. One day, some of the art centre staff asked if I would like to have a go carving and glazing a few works destined for the bin. I had played around with clay in school, but I never really saw myself as artistic. Still, I gave it a try and was hooked.
ES: You’re often described as using sgraffito carving on your work, but you prefer relief carving. Why is that?
AL: Yes. Sgraffito is when you’re glazing the vessel and then carving away a design. What I’m doing is closer to relief carving because it’s a little bit deeper, more like cutting into the work, and also because I’m not doing a bird design, which is more traditionally sgraffito, but rather gestural carving into the work for the purpose of revealing the clay.
ES: Why were you drawn to this technique?
AL: I use a lot of bright, bold, flat colour and relief carving reveals the natural, inner part of the clay that would otherwise be covered up and fully hidden away. I think of it as revealing the body of the clay, the body of the work.
ES: Is it also your intention to avoid a perfectly polished surface?
AL: The mountains of Central Australia are a constant source of inspiration, and the one thing to know about these mountains is that they’re covered in gaps and chasms and bits that have been eroded away or damaged to create beautiful imperfections. Similarly, the clay I use isn’t perfect. It has a lot of grog (a crushed, fired ceramic material) and other additives like sand and rocks that give it a rough texture and uneven surface. It’s this sense of chaos and erosion, and the bits of my work that are technically flaws, in the traditional sense of ceramics, that I think are beautiful and reflect the nature that I love.
ES: You’re originally from Snake Well in the Central Desert. How does home influence your work?
AL: When I was young, we moved to Alice Springs from Snake Well following a flood, but it’s still close to my heart. Snake Well is right next to the Strangways Range, which is this beautiful long mountain range, and while my work doesn’t literally or directly reflect the landscape, it does embody the feeling you get from the mountains, the idea of standing in the presence of something as awe-inspiring as the Strangways Range.
ES: You have described You and me, us never part as a love letter to your community, but also a reflection of the contradictory emotions – love and hate, pain and joy – we all experience, sometimes simultaneously.
AL: The work is a reflection of the reality of my life. I returned to Alice Springs recently for a funeral. It was a sombre occasion, but also a chance to see all the family I never get to see otherwise. I was sad to be there, but happy to see everyone. These sorts of contradictions in life are everywhere and experienced by everyone. To accept people and accept community, you have to accept the good and the bad. I come from a very big, complicated family and the joy of that always, I think, outweighs any sort of struggle inherently contained within it.
ES: Is that why there are two of them?
AL: Yes, the work is made up of two pieces. It’s also called You and me, us never part because although they theoretically could be shown in different times or separately by the NGV, they have a shared history and a shared connection that can never be erased.
ES: And the work’s title?
AL: It’s actually from The Color Purple. From the famous ‘Makidada’ hand-clap rhyme sung by [the film’s] protagonists, sisters Celie and Nettie.
ES: What inspires you to use such vibrant colours in your work?
AL: When I did my first show with the APY Studio, so many people told me my work reminded them of Central Australia with its use of black, brown and ochre. And yes, Central Australia has a lot of brown and ochre and muted greens, but there are also a lot of bright colours and a lot of life. So, I made this conscious decision to really start using colour in my work, first just stripes of it, then full colour. And it’s funny because almost all of the history of contemporary Indigenous art in Central Australia is bright-coloured. When you look at a Vincent Namatjira painting, it almost never has dark colours, almost never uses black. Perhaps in the zeitgeist it’s seen as a place that’s plain and dark, but it’s really not. It’s a place full of bright colours and full of joy.
ES: The soft raffia adornments of You and me, us never part are inspired by traditional techniques, is that right?
AL: Yes, the base part of the raffia has a coil technique inspired by basket making and traditional skirt making, but I purposely adopted a looser, rougher style so as not to mimic it exactly. It’s my own little rejection of tradition, my declaration to do it my own way – and the skirts themselves have gotten crazier and crazier as I’ve become more comfortable with the technique.
ES: Do you listen to music while you’re working? What’s on your playlist?
AL: You have to be very careful with the weaving because you’re using a very sharp needle, but at the moment I’ve been listening to Teeks, a cool singer from New Zealand. Nina Simone has been on rotation a lot, then sometimes it’s dance music, just repetitive drums. I tend to listen to songs that I know very well already, so I’m not focusing on them.
ES: How has your practice changed since 2021?
AL: The biggest progression has been moving away from creating objects to making figurative work. I see myself focusing less on using the surface to tell a story.
Indigenous contemporary ceramics in the past has been heavily surface-based. If you look at Thanakupi, the first Indigenous Australian artist to build a successful career in the ceramic medium, and the other original Indigenous ceramicists, their work is very surface-based for storytelling. I started in that, but now I’m heading more towards form-based work, allowing the form to tell a story and allowing the work to develop its own presence.
ES: Now that you are a Rigg Design Prize–winner, what are you planning to do?
AL: I am saving for my own studio one day. I think that’s every artist’s dream, but when it comes to ceramics, it’s very expensive. The Rigg Design Prize money is just enough to buy a new kiln, which is good.
ES: You and me, us never part is now on display in the Wurrdha Marra galleries at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. How does it now feel to think of your works in the context of the NGV Collection?
AL: It feels really good. I create the work intending for it to be seen, and it’s nice to know that it will in some way have an effect on many people to come, not just now, but until however long the Collection lasts in this world. I really don’t mind if people like them or hate them. I think the goal of the work is to be noticed and to have an effect on the space around it – and it will get to do that now
Elisa Scarton is NGV Senior Editorial Coordinator.
Alfred Lowe is an Arrente artist who works with clay and fibre in Adelaide.
The NGV warmly thanks the Cicely and Colin Rigg Bequest for supporting the 2025 Rigg Prize.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.