Market Stall
Susan Williams Kaurna Aboriginal Woman from south of Adelaide offers her Pit Fired Journey Buttons, Coolamon & Australian Animals. Susan started making Journey Buttons 5 years ago as a way to share and connect culture. These Journey Buttons will strengthen your connection to country – land, sea and sky – throughout your own journey. They are uniquely eye pleasing and a really special way of sharing self. Susan’s strong continuous connection to country is expressed in many different ways. As a very talented artist, Clay is one medium that strengthens her to maintain this connection while Susan acknowledges and pays her respect to the place of country where the clay medium she so lovingly shapes first comes from. Susan knows Clay as a gift from Mother Earth that we are able to create objects that are significant to self. These creative objects are then placed back into the earth where they are Pit Fired over 7 days. With the Earth and the Fire; Mother Earth dances her patterns all over and offers us her colours for our enjoyment. After seven days, the pit is opened and the clay creations that are pulled from the ashes have now turned to stone. The Journey Buttons will pick you. Offering you strong connection back to the gathering as well as Kaurna land in South Australia where the buttons were created and born from the earth. The idea that underpins the Journey Buttons is for you to rub them into the ground when you first receive them, rub it with leaves that are present and place it into water so that the Journey Button has been fully immersed into place where you are standing. Their purpose is to submerge you into country. By rubbing them with the dirt, the leaves of the trees, the water of the rivers and of the oceans, the Journey Button will link you with the place where you have been and strengthen your knowledge forward to the place where you are going. Then, by placing the button into the hole that secures the items of clothing, handbag or wherever you choose to fasten it, they become connectors to the embraced security, safety, and warmth of the item where it was fastened, being fully present amongst your treasured belongings. This connection brings your energy and intention to the earth, water, plants and whole environment of where you stand and wherever you go. The Journey Button becomes part of you. To introduce Susan, her first nation’s clan groups are from Susan’s paternal side. They are Kaurna People from Adelaide Plain, Ramindjeri from the Southern Fleurieu Peninsula and Narungga from Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. Her beautiful, inclusive, caring and strong mother (Non-Aboriginal) is from Bombala “Meeting of the Waters” Ngarigo country in South-Eastern New South Wales.” You will be able to see other sacred tools and animals of the first Nations people that Susan makes in clay and fires in her Pit at the Festival, examples like her Coolamon and Echidna.
