Announcing our 2025 Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize Winners
We’re thrilled to announce Lorraine Dean as the winner of the 2025 Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize, presented in collaboration with Craft.
Since 1994, Mud Australia has created elegant and timeless porcelain homewares. AU
The original Mud Australia store opened in Woollahra in 2007. Since then we’ve opened 13 stores globally.
Now in its fifth year, the SSCP celebrates exceptional creative practice, awarding a $10,000 grant to help support and advance the winner’s work.
This year, Shelley has also awarded three additional prizes, recognising the remarkable talent across the field.
We encourage you to visit Craft to see the exhibition in person, now showing until 31 August, 2025.
First Prize — Lorraine Dean
Lorraine’s work reimagines clay through a process that fuses porcelain with fabric, creating textured vessels that explore the tension between strength and vulnerability. Each piece is layered, fractured and tactile, inviting emotional and physical engagement.
Fabric plays a central role, embedding softness and memory into the porcelain. This original technique, developed through deep experimentation, bridges the traditions of textiles and ceramics to reflect the marks of personal relationships.
Sculptural rather than decorative, Lorraine’s vessels speak to themes of care, loss and resilience. Crafted with minimal processing and single firings, her work is both environmentally conscious and emotionally resonant - offering quiet reflections on identity, grief and human connection.
Lorraine receives a $10,000 cash prize to further her ceramics practice.
Photography by Henry Trumble.
To be acknowledged by peers and respected voices in the industry is both humbling and encouraging. This recognition not only affirms the direction of my practice but also inspires me to continue exploring and pushing boundaries. The support from this prize will allow me to further develop my work, particularly in the fusion of fabric and porcelain — a process that continues to reveal new layers of meaning and material possibility.
Second Prize — Steph Wallace
Steph Wallace is a ceramic artist based on Wadawurrung country in Ballarat, Victoria. Born in the UK, her practice blends traditional techniques with experimental approaches to explore narratives around cultural identity and place.
Working in a studio shaken daily by the impact of contemporary gold mining, Steph’s pieces reflect the fractured landscape she inhabits—a land shaped and scarred by centuries of extraction. Her architectural forms and abstract surfaces reference the volcanic origins of quartz, clay, and gold, as well as the physical and cultural upheaval left by historic diggings.
Through her work, Steph examines impermanence, erosion, and decay, while also confronting the region’s colonial legacies. Her ceramics serve as a meditation on the land’s dark history and ongoing healing, offering a powerful reflection on destruction, resilience, and cultural renewal.
Steph receives a $3,000 cash prize to further her ceramics practice.
Photography by Henry Trumble.
Making it to the finalist stage in a prize like this is a huge accomplishment. To have one’s effort and skill publicly recognised and rewarded in this way is incredibly validating. I have big dreams and goals within the ceramic arts, and being recognised through this prize represents a huge leap forward along this path.
Nani Puspasari
Nani's Wild Things Grew Again was created during a two-month residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan. Departing from her usual figurative work, Nani explored abstraction and texture, drawing inspiration from her childhood garden in South Borneo, destroyed by fire in 1993. Using raw Shigaraki clay and her first experience with Anagama wood firing, the work reflects on memory, destruction, and regrowth — a wild form rising from ruin.
Em Frank
Em's series of vessels draws on the landscapes, objects and textures of remote Australia. These are places shaped by isolation, resourcefulness and decay. Patinated metal from car wrecks, squashed billy cans and burnt-out tools become both inspiration and material, with lids and handles crafted from salvaged windscreen wipers, speaker components and ratchet straps. The ceramic bodies are made from recycled clay sourced from the JamFactory’s reclaim buckets and finished in a muted three-part calcium matte glaze.
Equal parts treasure hunter and maker, Frank spent time living out bush, developing a bowerbird-like habit of collecting mechanical fragments. She became fascinated by the accidental sculptural forms of mangled cars. These parts, once forgotten, are reimagined through her growing skills in welding and fabrication, developed during her associateship at JamFactory.
With a strong awareness of the environmental impact of making, Frank prioritises salvaged and recycled materials in her process. The result is work that feels deeply grounded, both materially and conceptually, in the rough poetry of the outback, where nothing is wasted and everything tells a story.
We’d like to thank everyone who applied this year and extend a special thanks to our partner, Craft. We’re also grateful to Iris Bakery and Code Black Coffee for the delicious morning provisions.
And to our finalists — Chrystie Longworth, Csongvay Blackwood, David Ray, Keiko Sato, Amelia Lynch, Gabriela Mello, Steph Wallace, Nani Puspasari, Raphael Karanikos, Lorraine Dean, Issy Parker and Em Franklin, thank you.
Your work continues to inspire, provoke and move us, and we’re so grateful to each of you for being part of this year’s selection.
Learn more about Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize here