Toni Warburton

The vase & flower show III

Toni Warburton is a visual artist, ceramist, gardener and occasional writer who lives and works between the Southern Highlands and the South Coast of New South Wales.

In her work, Toni engages with a range of media, situations and sites to explore ideas that predominantly engage with place and social relations around how human processes interact with and impact on natural ecosystems. Found and assembled objects and poetic surrealist notions of encounter and the uncanny inform her investigation of ceramic genres such as figurines and container forms and their relationships to social practices and embodied perception. Vase forms enter here as dynamic containers that hold water and cut plants through human gestures of collection and display.

Each of the Swag vases created for this Vase and Flower Show 2025 has been modelled from a single lump of clay. These ‘topological investigations’ involve a ludic engagement with the plasticity of terracotta and the fluidity of fabric. A draped swag over a window marks a threshold between interior space and the outdoors, as can a vase. Toni’s solo exhibitions develop around a core idea that enables riffs and variations to manifest through an immersive and sustained creative process. She has exhibited widely in curated group exhibitions in regional and university galleries and artist run spaces. She developed collaborative installations with the Williams River Valley Artists Project (WVRAP) and is currently a member of the Artists of the Round Yard collective (ARY), based at Retford Park Bowral, a property of the National Trust.

Toni has a Master of Visual Arts by research, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2000. Her work is held in selected National, State and Regional galleries and private collections. She has been the recipient of Australia Council grants for studio development and new work and undertaken residencies in India, Japan, Hill End, and China. Awarded a Commonwealth Research Fellowship (1987-88) to research and respond to Indian terracotta traditions, she was based in the sculpture department, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Gujerat. Toni has lectured in ceramics history and theory at a tertiary level and supervised post graduate art students.

Toni Warburton is represented by gallery LnL Sydney