For ceramicist and TOAST New Maker Amy Leeworthy, home sits on the edge of Australia’s Mornington Peninsula, a stretch of coastal Victoria where bushland meets sea and the salt air carries the sound of currawongs and cockatoos. Her house is a place of gentle chaos. With her two children running around, and a bevvy of pet animals,, she tells me that she has often thought about writing a children’s book set here.“Last summer, all these bees were living in the walls and the walls were dripping with honey,” she laughs. “It was kind of magical.” The natural world is not a backdrop here, but a character - shaping her routines and creative practice.
Amy came to the medium early. As a child, she was the youngest student by decades at an after-school ceramics class at a local community centre. “The teacher was great and encouraged me to make really big work,” she recalls. “Some things I made - which are still hanging around at both my parent’s homes - are a dragon and a huge bust of Pharaoh Ramesses II.” From the beginning, working with clay felt intuitive. Sculpting came easily, and Amy’s interest in form, scale, and tactility took root.
Later, after high school, Amy studied art and philosophy, trying her hand at painting, photography, video, and installation. But it was after becoming a mother that she found her way back to ceramics in a more committed form. Her then-partner gifted her a pottery wheel for her birthday, and in the rare quiet moments between naps and parenting, she began to experiment. “It’s always been essential to my mental health to have a creative practice,” she says. “Learning a new craft was really good for me in those years when so much of my creative energy was going to raising kids.”
This renewed practice coincided with a part-time job as a painter at a furniture-making collective in Northcote, Melbourne. The artists and makers who ran the space became close friends - and were the first to encourage her to share her ceramic pieces publicly. “They suggested I put my ceramics in the shop,” Amy explains. “Because of their following and reach, my work started being seen.”
There is a sculptural quality to Amy’s ceramics that recalls those early busts - a feeling for shape and weight that leans away from symmetry and perfection. “I’m always navigating a push and pull between balance and imperfection in my work,” she says. “Overall I’m looking for harmony, but I’m not interested in it in the traditional sense. I’m striving for a kind of intuitive balance.”
Her colour palette, too, is led by instinct. Living in a house that faces the sea, Amy often finds herself drawn to the subtle shifts of blues in sky and water. “One of the objects I always come back to is the cyanometer - a simple, beautiful tool invented in the eighteenth-century to measure the blueness of the sky. It’s basically a circle of gradually deepening blues, created to capture something intangible. I love that.” Like the cyanometer, her glazes offer small variations and surprises - “it’s never quite the same twice,” she says. “There is magic in opening the kiln and not knowing exactly what you’re going to get.”
For her New Makers 2025 collection for TOAST, Amy’s pieces - a pedestal bowl and two sculptural vases, each painted in her distinctive style - exist in the space between functional ceramics and sculpture. “They are unified in their muted colour palette, matte surface texture, and hand-drawn patterns,” she says. The pieces share a dialogue with her broader practice: a layered, painterly approach to surface, and a careful sense of proportion and restraint.
Most recently, Amy has been exploring new territory through a series of custom funerary urns made in collaboration with grieving families. “It has been an interesting turn for me and a rewarding process,” she says. “It’s an area I want to explore more in the future.” There’s a natural continuity between this kind of work and her existing approach - making vessels that hold memory, tenderness, and attention to the invisible threads that bind form to feeling.
Like the coast that surrounds her, Amy’s work resists neat definition. Her ceramics are painterly, sculptural, elemental: full of texture, gesture, and small, shifting blues.
Amy wears the TOAST Twisted Seam Japanese Denim Trousers, Wool Linen Patch Pocket Cardigan, and Lia Garment Dyed Boat Neck Tee.
Shop our New Makers 2025 collection.
Words by Lauren Sneade.
Photography by Benedetta Martini.
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