Ebony Russell is an Australian artist working primarily with porcelain. Her practice centres on highly labour-intensive, hand-piped ceramic forms that draw on traditions of domestic craft and ornamental decoration. Russell has exhibited internationally, including at Homo Faber, Venice; Art Miami; London Collect; and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. She is the winner of the Brookfield Properties Craft Award 2025 and the Jingdezhen Art Prize (Emerging Artist, 2025), and has also received major recognition including the Franz International Rising Star Award and the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize. Russell lives and works in Australia.

"Ebony Russell works with porcelain using a slow, physically demanding process of piping clay by hand into dense, continuous layers. This method—borrowed from cake decoration and other domestic craft traditions—allows ornament to function not as surface embellishment but as structure. Each work is built without armatures or moulds, relying on repetition, gravity, and accumulated pressure to hold itself upright.

Russell’s practice is driven by a sustained interest in labour that is historically feminised and undervalued: decorative work, domestic skill, patience, and excess. By pushing porcelain to its technical limits, she treats fragility and control as productive tensions rather than flaws. Collapse, wobble, and ornamentation are not risks to be hidden, but conditions that shape the final form.

Her sculptures deliberately resist the modernist separation between decoration and architecture. Pattern becomes load-bearing; excess becomes necessary. Drawing on traditions of ceramic display, cake piping, and ornamental craft, Russell’s work reclaims decoration as a site of authority, pleasure, and structural intelligence—one that refuses to be dismissed as merely superficial.