23 April 2026
The Selection Committee
Churchill Fellowship
Dear Selection Committee,
Re: Reference for Alex Linden — Churchill Fellowship Application
I am writing in support of Alex Linden’s application for a Churchill Fellowship, and I do so with genuine conviction. I know Alex as an incredible teacher, systems thinker, story teller, and connector. Following conversation with Alex about her proposed project, I can vouch that the way she teaches is inseparable from why this work matters and is of deep value to First Nations communities like mine, as well as to all Australians.
I am a Kaurareg woman and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Engagement Manager at Bush Heritage Australia. My work is about building partnerships with First Peoples, leaders, and communities to advance conservation outcomes that are culturally grounded and community led. Across that work, I coproduce and host a podcast and spend a great deal of time thinking about stories: who holds them, how they are passed on, and what happens when the tools for telling them disappear. That is the lens through which I came to appreciate what Alex is trying to do.
I took classes with Alex at her ceramics studio, and I want to be honest about what I found there. I had not expected much beyond learning a skill. What I actually experienced was something closer to restoration. Alex holds a learning space unlike almost anyone I have encountered. There is no performance to it. She is patient without being passive, skilled without being showy, and she has a way of drawing people into a state of focused calm that I find genuinely nourishing and deeply needed in today’s geopolitical fracturing and climate desparation. I always leave Alex’s classes feeling more settled than when I arrived. For someone doing work that is emotionally demanding, that is not a small thing. It is precisely the quality that matters most when you are asking people in community settings to make something personal and vulnerable, which is what portrait sculpture asks of you.
Alex’s project speaks about something I think about constantly in my professional life. The face carries extraordinary cultural weight. In many First Nations traditions it is not simply a likeness. It is a record of kinship, of belonging, of Country. To render a face in clay is to make a claim about who deserves to be remembered and on whose terms. The question Alex raises in her application, who do we record and why, is one of the most important questions in Indigenous knowledge practice. It sits at the heart of custodianship, of aural tradition, of the long argument about whose stories get preserved and how. Portrait sculpture, at its best, gives communities the agency to answer that question for themselves. That it has nearly vanished as a learnable craft in Australia is a real loss, and Alex’s project is a serious and well considered attempt to address it.
I want to say something about why I am choosing to collaborate with Alex specifically, because I think it speaks to her character as much as her skill. I have worked with a lot of artists and practitioners over the years, and technical ability is rarely what determines whether a community project succeeds (although Alex’s technical skills are absolutely awe inspiring). What truly matters is whether someone can hold space with genuine respect, adapt to contexts they did not anticipate, and bring enough humility to follow a community’s lead rather than impose a predetermined vision. Alex has all of that. She also has something rarer: the institutional relationships and teaching infrastructure to ensure that what she learns does not stay with her. It flows outward, into schools, community centres, studios and eventually into the hands of people who would never otherwise have access to this kind of learning. That dissemination capacity is central to why I want to collaborate with her.
The project we are planning together would use ceramic portraiture as a medium for storytelling with Indigenous communities, giving people whose faces and stories are rarely elevated in formal arts spaces the tools to represent themselves and their Country in their own voice. It is not a peripheral idea to my work; it is squarely within it. I would not be committed to it if I did not have complete confidence in Alex’s vision and her ability to carry it with the cultural sensitivity it requires.
Her application reflects that same seriousness. She has done the research to confirm that this training does not exist in Australia. She has secured institutional support that will translate her overseas learning into programs reaching students from Year 10 through to adult practitioners. She brings exceptional teaching experience, a clear community ethic, and artistic practice that takes the social function of art seriously. Those things together are a trifecta to ensure utmost success and project longevity.
I commend Alex Linden to the Churchill Fellowship without reservation. This is an investment that will be returned many times over, through her students, through the communities she works with, the works created, and through the quiet revival of an artform that has a great deal left to say.
Esso (thank you), yours sincerely,
Tiahni Adamson
Kaurareg Woman
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Engagement Manager -Bush Heritage Australia
SA Young Australian of the Year 2024 | SA Women of Impact 2025