Stephen Benwell is one of Australia’s most distinguished ceramicists, his major at college was ceramics under Prof Noel John Flood. The ceramics medium became the basis of his art practice, Benwell stating ‘I moved sideways into craft and pottery as a way to find a surface, a form, that I could put my painting onto.’ His work marries studio based investigations of the ceramicist with the painterly and sculptural concerns of the contemporary artist … eyeing the classical through the present.