In nipaluna/Hobart, ceramic artist Kate Bowman is asking what might happen if a restaurant’s leftovers did not mark the end of a material’s life, but the beginning of a new one.

As one of two artists selected for Regional Arts Australia’s Industry Residencies Pilot Program, Kate is leading Circular Hospitality, a design-led collaboration between Tasmania’s craft, design and hospitality sectors. 

Developed in partnership with Design Tasmania, The Agrarian Kitchen, Dier Makr and Scholé, the residency explores how post-consumer waste materials from hospitality venues can be transformed into ceramic glazes, functional objects, and new material systems.

For Kate, the early stages of the residency have been defined by time.

Providing her the time to visit venues, speak with chefs and owners, collect materials, test ideas, and sit with the possibilities that emerge when waste is treated not as a problem to discard, but as a resource to understand.

“The first thing really was about collecting data and going and spending time with each of the venues,” Kate says. “Trying to really get an understanding of what their pain points are with things that are left over that they have no use for.”

What she found was both exciting and challenging.

The three participating venues are already deeply committed to sustainability, which meant Kate had to look closely to find where her practice could meaningfully contribute.

“The Agrarian Kitchen visit was incredible. We spent the morning with owner Rodney Dunn and head gardener Mitch Theisen, talking through how materials move through the venue and the lengths they go to reuse as many ingredients as possible. By the end I realised there wasn't much leftover material for me to work with — amazing for them, but a real challenge for the project!’”

That challenge quickly became one of the residency’s most exciting opportunities.

At The Agrarian Kitchen, where much of the menu is shaped by what is grown and harvested on site, Kate noticed plastic pots being used in the greenhouse to raise seedlings. From there, an idea began to form: could waste materials from the venue be used to create ceramic seedling pots that would help grow the next generation of produce?

“What if we looked at developing a ceramic structure from their waste materials to replace the plastic pots," Kate says. "Taking the very materials they could offer us, and using them to help grow the next generation of food — that felt like a genuinely wonderful, circular moment.”

The materials Kate is working with from The Agrarian Kitchen include oyster shells, bone, broken ceramics, glass, wine bottles, and recently, bricks from the venue’s oven after it was upgraded. The old oven bricks have become a key part of her research, offering strength and porosity depending on how finely they are broken down and sieved.

“Even though it’s the one material, by breaking it down into different sizes, it actually serves a different purpose in the structure,” Kate explains.

For The Agrarian Kitchen, she is currently testing slip-cast seedling pods, creating a new process in her own ceramics practice, and one that could potentially allow the objects to be produced at a larger scale.

“It would be incredible to reach the end of the residency with something that could actually be scaled up for commercial use,” she says.

Each venue has led Kate in a different direction.

For Dier Makr, known for its extensive organic wine list, Kate is working with oyster shells and wine bottles. She is grinding the glass down into powder, testing it in the kiln, and exploring whether it can be transformed into a lighting collection for the restaurant.

With the glass, it's a completely different process," she says. "I'm about to start testing — turning it into sheets of glass in a kiln, then taking those sheets and slumping them into moulds.”

For Scholé, an intimate Japanese restaurant housed in an old turn-of-the-century confectionery shop, Kate has been given abalone shell, brick, sake bottle glass and fryer oil. The history of the building has helped guide the outcome: Kate is developing commercial floor tiles that respond to the venue’s existing vintage tiles while introducing a new material story.

“Luke [owner and head chef] wants to create a new tile that is sympathetic to the history of the building,” she says. “Imagine a tile made entirely from repurposed waste.”

The fryer oil has presented one of the most unexpected research challenges. Kate is investigating whether it could be used as a surface polymer or sealant, potentially giving the tiles grip, an important practical consideration in a restaurant setting.

“I've made a series of tiles using only the materials he's given me, which has been incredible," she says. "They're not quite hard enough yet, but I'm about to fire a batch and see how they come out of the kiln — testing how hard and durable they are.”

Across all three venues, the residency is pushing Kate into unfamiliar technical territory. Her existing practice has long explored local materials, waste streams and experimental ceramic surfaces, but this project is asking those materials to behave in new ways.

“With my practice, all my work that I’ve made to date has been fired at a certain temperature,” she says. “Whereas with all these new materials, I’m really having to test at all different kinds of temperatures.”

She is also questioning how to make the process more efficient. Some outcomes may be single-fired rather than fired twice, reducing energy use. For the commercial tiles, she is even testing a cold-press method, which could avoid firing altogether.

The residency has given Kate the rare opportunity to slow down enough to pursue those questions properly.

“I’m a full-time artist, I have a couple of teaching jobs just to keep a bit of regular income, but the hustle is relentless,” she says. “The industry residency program has been so amazing to be able to just take your foot… from overdrive into second gear instead, and just have the time.”

That time, she explains, is not only studio time. It is thinking time, research time, driving time, conversation time.

“There’s so much thinking time, there’s lots of desktop time, there’s lots of chats while heading out to the restaurants,” she says. “There’s no way I would have had that time to just breathe, and sit with thoughts and ideas.”

Before the residency, Kate was already working with some of the participating restaurants, collecting materials and transforming them into glazed surfaces for tableware that could be returned to the venues. The Industry Residencies Pilot Program has allowed her to expand that work into deeper material research and more ambitious outcomes.

“The residency is great because it’s allowed me to look deeper into other materials,” she says. “It’s afforded me the time to really go deep and look at other test cases.”

Those learnings are already feeding back into her broader practice.

“All these learnings will definitely underpin some of my work going forward,” she says. “It can only really help make my practice more and more sustainable.”

Kate’s interest in waste and local materials began after moving to Tasmania. Having previously run a pottery school on the mainland, she became increasingly aware of the environmental realities behind ceramic production.

“There’s an attitude that something handmade is better than something made in a factory,” she says. “But in reality, all those materials that you go and buy from the pottery shop are still extracted from the ground, mostly overseas.”

When she arrived in Hobart, she began picking up local rocks, shells, bottles and other discarded materials, testing them in the kiln and discovering their potential. Tasmania’s geology, history, restaurant culture and sense of place all became part of the work.

“Tasmania has this incredible geology, rocks and materials with a history tracing back to the Triassic,” Kate says. “I honestly just started picking things up and testing them and getting some amazing results.”

For Kate, the circularity of the project is not only environmental, but cultural and relational. Materials come from a place, are transformed through craft, and return to that place as functional objects — cups, tiles, lights, seedling pots — carrying their own story back into the venues that generated them.

“Hobart has such a small footprint, yet it's home to restaurants with such an outsized reputation, and everything is genuinely local," she says. "We can trace exactly where these materials come from... it creates a real talking point, and gets people thinking about the materials around them.”

For Regional Arts Australia, this is the promise of the Industry Residencies Pilot Program: to support artists to work directly with regional industries, bringing creative thinking to shared challenges and opening up new possibilities for collaboration, sustainability and innovation.

Kate’s residency is still in its testing phase, with the next iterations of the seedling pots and tiles underway and early prototypes for the lighting collection beginning to take shape. By the end of June, she hopes to have a clearer pathway for each outcome, ready to refine in conversation with the venues.

The process is slow, technical, messy and full of failure, but something Kate says is often hidden behind the polished images people see at the end.

“People see the nice shiny object at the end of it,” she says. “But they’ve got no idea about all the research and the failures and the kiln mishaps.”

In Circular Hospitality, those hidden stages are the work. The testing, grinding, firing, slumping, sieving, note-taking and problem-solving are all part of a larger question: how can creative practice help regional industries rethink what materials are worth?

For Kate, the answer is still forming in the kiln.

But already, the residency is showing how artists can create new systems from what others leave behind and how waste, in the right hands, can become a new story, a story of care and renewal.