Maha Pothead’s pair of ceramic vessels confront the silenced histories of Western Australia’s pearling industry, focusing on the exploitation of Indigenous women’s bodies, labour, and reproductive lives. Referencing archival histories of coercion and colonial violence, the works consider how pregnant Indigenous women were both erased and instrumentalised within systems of extraction and profit.

Painted in blue and white, the vessels pay homage to Dutch Delftware while interrogating its colonial legacy. Historically associated with depictions of trade, empire, and slavery, Delftware becomes a visual language through which beauty and violence coexist. Maha Pothead reclaims this aesthetic, transforming the ceramic surface into a site of resistance and remembrance.

The vessels hold tensions between fertility, dispossession, and survival, asking viewers to reconsider how colonial histories are preserved, aestheticized, and obscured.