Her pottery studio is nestled among green rolling hills, overlooking gnarled trees and lush green paddocks descending down the valley. 

Classical music gently pipes through her cosy, bright studio and a sense of serenity exudes. 

Alting sits at her wheel to create, surrounded by her work in various stages of completion. Working with porcelain, her pieces are distinctive for their bright colours and abstract designs. 

One might say pottery found Alting, rather than the other way around. 

“A friend of mine way back wanted to do adult education and she wanted me to come and I was, ‘Oh no,’ because I was into hairdressing,” she said. But, she went. 

“The minute I was there I loved it, I was honestly bitten by it … The minute I touched the clay it was just wonderful.”

And so Alting was set on a path of discovery and learning, spending years studying her passion. 

“It’s one of the hardest crafts to master because you have to be a designer, a decorator, a craftsperson to do the firing, a bit of a chemist to make your glazes ... because we do all of that, everything we do ourselves,” she said. 

“There were lots of failures, absolutely lots of failures ... things would come out of the kiln and ‘bomp!’ smash it because it didn't come out the way I imagined it to be, planned it to be.”

After many years of practise and refining her craft, Alting has found her niche. She delights in the process of creation. 

“To be able to sit down at the wheel and to, out of a lump of clay, create something that’s just lovely, sensual, beautiful and decorative,” she said.

Part of the magic of Alting Alting’s ceramics is that each piece is unique from the next. She hand paints each design, using brushes she has made herself with horse hair, dog hair, even human hair. 

Although her art is abstract Alting is influenced by the nature that surrounds her. 

“I’m influenced by nature but I don't copy it, because nature is not art,” she said. 

“Art is the interpretation of the individual, of how I see it (nature) and then produce that.”

Alting believes that studying art teaches you a new way of seeing the world, showing you to look at things differently. 

“You see the shades and the light and the negative spaces as well as the positive and so forth and so you look at things so differently and it's such a pleasure to see that,” she said. 

Alting’s studio sits alongside potter Rynne Tanton’s, and the difference between their work is striking. Tanton’s designs are all about texture, physical texture and coloured texture. 

Tanton has built several studios, complete with kilns and has now built a foundry to begin bronze work, his and Alting’s next step.