Lauren Francescone & Rebecca Ramsey: Homebody is on view at Galerie d’Outremont, Montréal

September 9 – November 1, 2026

Essay by Anaïs Castro

The home is often imagined as the place where the self begins: a space of retreat, intimacy, habit, and protection. Yet a home is never simply a shelter. Homes absorb histories, regulate movement, mediate relationships, and quietly shape the ways bodies inhabit space. It is an extension of the body, a vessel for memory, a system of boundaries, and a site where invisible forces such as care, labour, technology, desire, contamination, and communication circulate continuously. Walls regulate intimacy as skin regulates touch; windows are like eyes that open onto the world. Long before architecture became an object of design, the house functioned as a living organism, mediating our relationship to the world. At the heart of Lauren Francescone and Rebecca Ramsey’s two-person exhibition lies this simple yet expansive proposition: that the body and the home are reciprocal structures through which we understand ourselves and our relationship to the surrounding world.

Having developed an ongoing dialogue over the past four years through their respective ceramic practices, Francescone and Ramsey have discovered a remarkable convergence of interests while maintaining distinct artistic voices. Both approach clay as a material capable of registering transformation while investigating domestic space as a site where intimacy and broader ecological, technological, and cultural systems intersect. Developed through parallel residencies in the spring of 2026—Francescone at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan and Ramsey at Medalta in Alberta—the works presented here mark a significant evolution in both artists’ practices. These residencies afforded opportunities to work at a larger scale while deepening an engagement with ceramic processes, particularly reduction firing and soda firing. In the gallery space, the resulting sculptures create a deconstructed domestic environment.

The exhibition’s title, Homebody, evokes a term often used to describe someone who prefers the familiarity of home to the bustle of public life. It suggests someone choosing withdrawal, introversion, or even social disengagement. Yet in recent years, the home has become increasingly charged as a place where care and labour converge and where work and private life collapse into one another. For both Francescone and Ramsey, home is understood not as a stable refuge but as a permeable organism whose boundaries are constantly negotiated. Their works suggest that isolation is never absolute. Even the most private spaces remain entangled with networks of communication, energy, and exchange. The home is simultaneously as sanctuary and an interface, a shelter and a conduit, a place where vulnerability is both protected and revealed.

Clay is uniquely suited to such an inquiry. Before becoming ceramic, clay remains infinitely responsive and capable of recording the slightest pressure of a hand while preserving traces of time itself. Once fired, it becomes fixed, durable, yet perpetually vulnerable to fracture. Francescone and Ramsey approach clay as a conceptual material whose transformations mirror broader cycles of ecological, bodily, and technological change. Fire, pressure, crystallization, sedimentation, drying, melting, and fracture are not merely technical processes but metaphors for the conditions through which contemporary life itself is experienced.

For Lauren Francescone, the domestic interior has become increasingly entangled with invisible technological infrastructures. Contemporary homes are saturated with signals, networks, wireless transmissions, and glowing screens that quietly organize everyday life while remaining largely imperceptible. Rather than opposing digital technologies to handcrafted making, Francescone proposes unexpected continuities between them. Both involve systems of transformation, the transmission of energy, and acts of translation.

Her ceramic sculptures borrow from familiar domestic and architectural forms while subtly destabilizing their functions. These recognizable objects become strangely autonomous, inviting viewers to consider the hidden infrastructures they normally overlook. The apartment buzzer, for instance, becomes more than a practical device: it marks the invisible thresholds that regulate access, belonging, and exclusion within urban life. Likewise, fused glass works evoke luminous screens, or portals through which perception itself becomes mediated.

Francescone’s practice is deeply invested in the sensuous qualities of ceramics. Saturated glazes, richly coloured surfaces, and carefully composed forms recall both the decorative traditions of pottery and the visual language of graphic design. Yet beneath this seductive materiality lies an ongoing meditation on communication itself. Electricity moving through wires, heat circulating within a kiln, information travelling through digital networks—all depend upon invisible forms of energy that transform one state into another. Earth becomes stone through fire; raw matter becomes image or interface. The ancient alchemy of ceramics quietly parallels the magic of digital communication.

Rebecca Ramsey approaches domestic space through another set of circulatory systems. For her, the house and the body are reciprocal metaphors whose internal structures correlate to one another. Hidden behind walls, ceramic pipes weave through custom drywall constructions, appearing and disappearing as though veins beneath skin. Their looping trajectories evoke anatomical drawings while simultaneously referencing plumbing systems that sustain everyday domestic life. These open and closed circuits suggest bodies that are both autonomous and dependent, self-contained yet profoundly interconnected.

Ramsey’s sculptures frequently draw attention to those architectural elements designed to remain unseen: drainage systems, cavities within walls, hidden conduits through which water, waste, and energy circulate. By rendering these concealed infrastructures visible, she invites us to reconsider the fragile systems that support everyday existence. Hygienic fixtures become sites where questions of purity, vulnerability, and mortality quietly converge.

Her work engages with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s influential arguments in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, where dirt is famously understood as “matter out of place.” Douglas argues that concepts of cleanliness and contamination are never purely hygienic but instead reveal cultural systems for maintaining order and establishing boundaries. Domestic objects play a central role within these systems. Vessels simultaneously contain nourishment and receive refuse; lavatories facilitate cleansing while collecting waste. They occupy a paradoxical position between preservation and rejection.

Ramsey extends these ideas materially through her sophisticated use of ceramic glazes. Soda-fired surfaces, crystallized deposits, oozing textures, compressed forms, and fractured finishes evoke geological as well as bodily processes. Her tiled wall installation, punctuated by shell-like protrusions resembling shower niches, is glazed with soda ash—a crystalline residue considered an undesirable by-product in soap making. Here, what is ordinarily discarded becomes aesthetically productive, collapsing distinctions between cleanliness and contamination, ornament and residue.

Running throughout Homebody is a sustained investigation of thresholds. The exhibition repeatedly inhabits spaces of transition: inside and outside, visible and concealed, handcrafted and digital, organic and architectural, softness and rigidity, liquid and solid. These oppositions never fully resolve. Instead, they remain in productive tension, allowing each sculpture to function as a kind of portal between multiple states of being.

This condition is reinforced through the exhibition’s architectural design. In the exhibition, sculptures emerge from architectural fragments and reveal unexpected spatial encounters between bodies and objects. Francescone and Ramsey have constructed a series of freestanding drywall structures that function simultaneously as partitions and exhibition plinths. Drywall, an essential component of contemporary architecture, also serves in ceramic studios as an absorbent surface on which clay is formed, dried, and stored. This dual function complicates the distinction between process and finished object, positioning the exhibition itself as a space where acts of making remain visibly embedded within the final form.

These temporary constructions organize the gallery less as an exhibition than as a sequence of domestic vignettes. Visitors navigate partial rooms, concealed corners, interrupted sightlines, and moments of unexpected discovery. Sculptures appear to emerge naturally from these architectural fragments, encouraging movement through the space that mirrors the intimate rhythms of inhabiting a home. Following the exhibition, the drywall will be dismantled and returned to the artists’ studios, where it will resume its ordinary function within ceramic production. Even the exhibition architecture participates in an ongoing cycle of transformation rather than existing as a fixed monument.

In shaping clay, Francescone and Ramsey do not seek to illustrate these relationships directly. Rather, their works operate through material analogy. The transformations undergone by clay become vehicles for thinking about bodies, technologies, homes, and environments as interconnected systems in perpetual exchange. Their sculptures resist fixed interpretation, preferring to remain open, suggestive, and quietly enigmatic. The artists invite us to reconsider the thresholds we cross every day, the infrastructures we rarely notice, and the material worlds that quietly sustain us. In doing so, Homebody reminds us that to belong to a home is also to belong to the earth itself.

Lauren Francescone (b. 1983, New York City) lives in Montreal. She is the publisher and designer of Temperatures, a biannual publication about artists working in clay. She has attended numerous residencies including the Banff Centre (2015), the European Ceramic Workcentre (2020), and Anderson Ranch Art Center (2021). Recent exhibitions include Timeline at the ICA, Richmond, Virginia (2024), and Visitor at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan (2026). She has a BS from the University of Virginia School of Architecture and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.

Rebecca Ramsey is an artist originally from British Columbia and currently based in Montreal. She has a BFA from Emily Carr University (2017) and an MFA from Concordia University (2024). She has attended residencies at Guldagergaard, Denmark (2017), Est-Nord-Est, St. Jean Port Joli (2025), and Medalta, Medicine Hat (2018/2026). Her work has been exhibited at Projet Casa, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, DRAC, Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK, Galerie Nicolas Robert and Axenéo7.

Anaïs Castro is a curator and writer based between New York and Montreal. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor’s degree from Concordia University. Her professional experience includes the National Gallery of Canada and Arsenal Contemporary Art, and she currently serves as Curator at Centre d’art CAB. Castro has independently curated exhibitions and projects across North America, Europe, and Asia. She regularly contributes to a range of art publications, engaging with contemporary artistic practices and the evolving discourses that shape the field.

The artists would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the Maison de la culture d’Outremont for their financial support.

Contact
galerie.outremont@montreal.ca

Galerie d’Outremont
41 Av. Saint-Just
Montréal (Québec) H2V 4T7
Canada

Photos by Atlas Documentation and Lauren Francescone

Lydia SooJin Park (b. 1989) is an artist based between Seoul and Oslo. Working primarily with clay, her practice engages with memory, perception, and materiality through ceramic-based works that move between painting and sculpture. Her surfaces unfold as layered structures where image and object remain in constant negotiation, emphasizing the physical presence of fragile material as a carrier of temporal and emotional traces.

She received her BFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009–2013), her MA from Hongik University (2019–2021), and her MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2021–2023). In 2023, she was awarded the Student Prize by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts, and in 2024 she received the Talente Prize – Meister der Zukunft from the Chamber of Crafts for Munich and Upper Bavaria (HWK für München und Oberbayern), Germany. She has participated in residency programs including Arabia Art Department Society in Finland (2024), Senter for Keramisk Kunst in Norway (2025), Hanwha Foundation of Culture (2025), and Cerámica Suro in Mexico (2026).

In addition to exhibitions and residencies, Park has been commissioned to create permanent public ceramic works for Psykisk Helsenvern Nordbyhagen at Akershus University Hospital (AHUS HF) in Norway. The project, which includes both interior and exterior installations, is scheduled for completion in 2026.

Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, the United States, and Asia, and is included in institutional collections such as the National Museum of Norway (Nasjonalmuseet), KODE Art Museums of Bergen, Oslo Municipality, the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Visit Lydia SooJin Park’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2021-2026

My work explores the accumulation of memory, emotion, and time through layered ceramic surfaces that exist between painting and sculpture. Using thin sheets of clay, I construct compositions that function as both physical objects and painterly images, blurring the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space.

Rather than approaching clay as a material to be transformed beyond recognition, I work with it in a way that preserves its material presence—its weight, fragility, and tactile resistance remain visible throughout the process. In this sense, the clay is not merely a carrier of image or form, but an active surface that continues to assert its own materiality.

I use clay as a medium for abstraction, gesture, texture, and accumulation. Fragments, stains, and assembled surfaces become visual traces that resemble emotional residues or incomplete memories. The works are often wall-mounted, operating as sculptural paintings or tactile surfaces that extend beyond conventional definitions of ceramics.

I am interested in how memory continuously shifts through time—never fixed, but repeatedly accumulated, fragmented, and transformed. Through processes of layering, erosion, and material tension, the works reflect the instability of perception and the persistence of emotional traces.

While some forms subtly reference organic shapes or functional vessels, they ultimately move away from utility and toward abstraction. By navigating between surface and object, image and material, I aim to create works that hold memory not as narrative, but as embodied sensation embedded within form.

Surface Memory – Norwegian Crafts & Ceramica Suro Residency, 2025-2026

Material Memory (Accumulation), 2021-2026

2.5 Dimensions, 2021

Captions

• My Deepest Blue: landscape II, 2026, glazed ceramics, 90.9 x 121.2 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Process documentation at Ceramica Suro Residency, 2026, photo by Santiago Vega
• My Deepest Blue: Untitled, 2026, glazed ceramics, 90.9 x 121.2 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Materiality I (Landscape), 2022-3, glazed ceramics with glass, 50 x 60 cm
• Unfolding Comes to Rest II, 2026, glazed ceramics, 60 x 60 cm (each), photo by Santiago Vega
• Sustaining Memory and History, 2025, glazed porcelain, 21 x 30 x 6 cm, photo by Thomas T.
• Green Light Beneath, 2024-5, glazed ceramics, 7 x 22 x 3 cm, photo by Thomas T.
• When the Sky Breathes, the Water Listens, 2025, glazed porcelain, 23 x 40 x 6 cm, photo by Thomas T.

• Reflections in the Current, 2026, glazed ceramics, 42 x 40 x 85 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• The Blooming Vessel, 2026, glazed ceramics, 40 x 35 x 60 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Goryeo Celadon Re-born in 21st-Century Mexico, 2026, glazed ceramics, 30 x 30 x 82 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Beneath, Many Tales II (That which breathes with us), 2026, glazed ceramics, 17 x 22 x 44 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Enfolding Currents – Foundations, 2026, glazed ceramics, 23 x 35 x 56 cm, photo by Santiago Vega
• Time of Observation, 2023-5, glazed ceramics with gold, 29 x 16 x 24 cm, photo by Thomas T.
• Winter Butterfly, 2023-2024, glazed ceramics, 30 x 30 x 27 cm, photo by Thomas T.
• Blue Cobalt in 2022, 2022, glazed ceramics, 40 x 20 x 50 cm
• Blue Cobalt in 2023, 2023-2024, glazed ceramics with cobalt oxide, 36 x 21.5 x 31 cm, photo by Thomas T.
• Wishes, 2021, glazed ceramics, 19 x 30 x 13 cm

• In between, 2020, glazed ceramics, 34.5 x 31.5 x 7.2 cm, photo by Heesoo Park
• Untitled, 2020, glazed ceramics, 31.5 x 27 x 3.8 cm, photo by Heesoo Park
• My day, 2020, glazed ceramics, 26 x 27 x 5 cm, photo by Heesoo Park
• 4 different shapes, 2020, glazed ceramics, 66 x 48 x 5.5 cm, photo by Heesoo Park
• Unused I, 2021, glazed ceramics, various dimensions, photo by Heesoo Park
• Blue bottle, 2021, glazed ceramics, 26 x 31 x 4.5 cm, photo by Heesoo Park

What does it mean to belong? To a place, a community, a culture – or to a shared memory, gesture or ritual? Forms of Belonging, the sixth edition of the Officine Saffi Award, explores these questions through an international exhibition dedicated to the ways ceramics can create spaces of recognition and connection.

Opened in Milan on September 30, Forms of Belonging brings together 28 artists selected from more than 1,000 applications submitted from 41 countries across five continents. Presented at Fondazione Officine Saffi until November 13, 2026, the exhibition offers a broad view of contemporary ceramic practice, bringing together sculpture, functional objects, installations and narrative works situated between contemporary art, craft and collectible design. Rather than proposing a single definition of what ceramics can be, the sixth edition of the Award reflects the extraordinary diversity of the medium today. The selected artists approach clay through different cultural backgrounds, generations and artistic languages, revealing a field in which traditional knowledge and experimental research exist side by side.

The idea of home provides a first point of departure for thinking about belonging. Home can be the place we return to, a retreat that offers protection, intimacy and a sense of recognition. In Forms of Belonging, this idea is articulated not only through the works themselves, but also through the exhibition display. Pale blue partition walls divide the light-filled spaces of Fondazione Officine Saffi, the Milanese home of contemporary ceramics, founded by Laura Borghi in 2011 and relocated to its present premises two years ago. Matching blue shelves line the walls, creating a setting that evokes a domestic interior – an environment in which the works appear to inhabit different rooms, niches and arrangements. The house itself emerges as a motif at the very beginning of the exhibition, in Jonathan Baldock’s It’s my house and I live here (2025). A vertical, column-like ceramic house, built from what resembles a brick structure, sprouts ears, a mouth and limbs. Half house, half human, it appears as though its inhabitant has merged with the architecture itself. Two wall-based works, hung like pictures in a domestic interior, reinforce the sense of a lived-in space. Samantha Kerdine’s L’Ètreinte (2026) presents a framed fragment of a person sitting comfortably with a cat. Its composition evokes the intimacy of a domestic photograph – the kind of image that might hang above a sofa, quietly recording a moment of closeness. Gerald Mak’s Over Persimmon and Tea (2026), meanwhile, turns to another kind of everyday scene. Two hands are depicted peeling a persimmon over a table set with tea and grapes. The scene suggests the quiet rituals of domestic life: a table prepared for family or friends, the attentive gesture of peeling fruit, and the act of passing it on to others. The long, delicate fingers give the gesture an almost fairy-like quality. This distinctive motif recurs throughout Mak’s work, imbuing familiar moments with a sense of quiet poetry. Both artists were also among the recipients of this year’s residency prizes: Kerdine received the Taoxichuan Art Centre Residency Prize in China, while Mak was awarded the Albuquerque Foundation Residency Prize in Portugal.

Throughout the exhibition, objects appear as vessels of memory. They carry traces of earlier stages of our lives, remaining with us as tangible links to places, people and experiences that belong to the past. There is a particular kind of recognition in returning, as an adult, to one’s childhood home and finding a room preserved almost exactly as it was left behind – the objects still occupying their familiar places, suspended in another moment of life. This sensation resonates in Ornaghi & Prestinari’s Uscire dal Guscio (2026), placed on a small shelf at the edge of one of the exhibition displays. Like a remnant from childhood, a small sailing boat rises from a stone. The hull is made from half a walnut shell; its ceramic sail and white ceramic wave carry the boat forward, the wave itself shaped from the imprint of a kitchen sponge. The Italian title, Uscire dal Guscio – “coming out of one’s shell” – suggests a movement outward, away from the protected space of childhood and towards independence. The work thus resembles a small relic of a life already left behind: an object that might once have held meaning and now survives as a fragment of memory. A similar sense of persistence surrounds Agalis Manessi’s cat sculpture It’s behind you (2024). Like an object kept on a shelf in a family home, waiting patiently to be encountered again, the sculpture seems to carry the weight of something remembered rather than simply something seen. But what, exactly, lies behind us? The childhood in which such an object might once have had meaning? The object itself? Or the memory that remains attached to it?

For Marten Herma Anderson, belonging is closely connected to memory and place. His work Held Together (2026) draws on the landscapes and memories of his childhood on the Baltic island of Rügen, particularly his grandmother’s garden. The vessel is constructed from a sequence of pressed-flower forms, arranged one after another to build up its sculptural body. Their delicate shapes recall botanical specimens preserved in childhood memory. In striking contrast, the entire surface is covered with a silver glaze, which envelops the flowers in a reflective, almost protective skin. In Mel Arsenault’s And All This Time We Were In Heaven (2026), a vase becomes almost a field of colour. Its surface is covered by flowing glazes from which flowers seem to emerge, as if taking shape within a constantly shifting stream of pigment. Positioned in front of the glass facade, the work is reflected in the windows overlooking the green courtyard, creating a subtle dialogue between the ceramic object and the vegetation beyond. Flowers also reappear in Cody Hoyt’s (Untitled) Landscape Drawing Vessel (2026), one of the works that immediately catches the eye upon entering the exhibition. Hoyt, recipient of the Fondazione Officine Saffi Special Residency Prize, constructs his vessels from differently pigmented clays, layering, cutting and recombining them into intricate patterns before transforming the flat compositions into three-dimensional forms. The technical mastery of this process is striking, requiring an extraordinary degree of precision as the individual elements are layered, cut and assembled into a coherent whole. Loong Pan’s ongoing series Leaves (2022–ongoing) approaches the relationship between plant life and environment through an extraordinary act of ceramic imitation. Each work meticulously reproduces an actual leaf, capturing its delicate veins, contours and irregularities in clay with remarkable precision. The technical skill is striking: fragile organic structures are translated into enduring ceramic forms with an almost uncanny degree of accuracy. Arranged in an archival sequence reminiscent of a natural history collection, the leaves appear like specimens preserved for close observation. Their glazed surfaces reinforce this impression of conservation, as if the fragile forms had been captured and suspended in time. The works thus blur the boundary between natural specimen and crafted object, transforming something ephemeral into something enduring. Pan is one of two recipients of the Young Artist Prize by Ottostumm | Mogs, alongside Takumi Morozumi. Conceived as an acquisition prize to support a new generation of artists at a crucial stage in their careers, the award recognises emerging practices and supports their further development and visibility. For Pan, whose Leaves combines exceptional technical precision with a sensitive engagement with the natural world, the recognition feels particularly well deserved.

Belonging can also unfold through cultural memory: through stories, images and symbols inherited from a shared cultural history. In Krzysztof Strzelecki’s Labour IV: The Erymanthian Boar and the Death of Chiron (2025), references to ancient mythology bring a centuries-old narrative into a contemporary ceramic context. At the same time, the work connects to the history of ceramics itself, recalling the long tradition of using vessels as surfaces for storytelling. Marta Pierobon’s Cecilia 2 (Las MENINAS) (2026) approaches cultural memory through another canonical image. By referring to Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the work enters into a dialogue with one of the defining traditions of Western painting. Here, belonging is no longer tied to a specific landscape or personal biography, but to a shared visual history: a repertoire of images that has been transmitted, reinterpreted and continually revisited. The reference transforms the ceramic work into part of a larger conversation about how cultural memory is formed – and how artists can position themselves within, respond to or reconfigure the histories they inherit. Both artists were also recognised with residency prizes this year: Pierobon received the Bruckner Foundation Residency Prize in Switzerland, while Strzelecki was awarded the Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona Residency Prize in Italy.

Belonging can also be expressed through the materials we inherit and the places from which they come. In Bisila Noha’s practice, clay becomes a means of connecting personal experience, cultural identity and the histories carried by materials. Her vase Baney B60 (2025), presented at Officine Saffi, is composed of different earths brought together within a single vessel. The work turns soil into a tangible expression of place, bringing different landscapes and histories into one form. Noha’s wider practice explores identity, memory and community, drawing attention to the knowledge and traditions carried across generations, as well as to the often-overlooked contributions of Black women to the history of art and craft. This affinity with materiality and the relationship between artistic expression, human experience and design also informs the Tacchini Prize, awarded to the artist. Conceived as an opportunity for further research and exchange, the prize includes a dedicated exhibition at Casa Tacchini in Milan, where a selection of her works will be presented from October 1 to November 13, 2026. Set within the domestic environment of the apartment in Brera, the exhibition brings Noha’s work into dialogue with the idea of home, extending the exploration of belonging beyond the walls of Officine Saffi. A related connection between material and cultural heritage emerges in Phoebe Collings-James’s Infidel (2023). Drawing on West African and Caribbean coiling techniques alongside other historical and visual references, her ceramic forms bring different cultural histories into dialogue with one another. The vessel becomes more than a functional or sculptural object: it becomes a site where knowledge, memory and identity can meet.

The question of belonging finds a particularly powerful expression in the work of South African artist Andile Dyalvane, winner of the €10,000 Main Prize. Born in the rural Eastern Cape, Dyalvane draws deeply on his Xhosa heritage and his spiritual connection to the land and his ancestors. For him, clay is more than a material: it is umhlaba, or “mother earth,” a medium through which histories, cultural knowledge and lived experiences can be carried across generations. Created together with his wife, Nkuthazo Alexis Dyalvane, iThwasa (The One Who is Blossoming) (2026) embodies this understanding of ceramics as a vessel of memory, identity and lineage. The work takes on the presence of a body, suggesting a living entity that holds traces of both individual and collective experience. Surreal and quietly unsettling, it seems at once deeply grounded in reality and to belong to another realm, bringing the ancestral into dialogue with the contemporary. Its title evokes a process of transformation and becoming, suggesting that identity is never entirely fixed but continues to unfold through relationships, inherited knowledge and encounters with the world. In this sense, belonging emerges not simply as an attachment to a particular place, but as an ongoing connection to those who came before us and those with whom we share the present. Dyalvane’s work affirms ceramics’ capacity to hold collective memory and give material form to a sense of belonging that is at once deeply personal and shared. As the recipient of the Main Prize, the work will become part of the Fondazione Officine Saffi Collection, allowing this conversation between material, memory and cultural inheritance to continue beyond the exhibition.

Beyond the works discussed above, the Award’s residency programme also recognises the practices of Trude Westby Nordmark, recipient of the Guldagergaard Residency Prize in Denmark, and Tomás Díaz Cedeño, awarded the Senter for Keramisk Kunst Residency Prize in Norway. Together with the other residency awards, these opportunities extend the exhibition beyond Milan, allowing artists to pursue further research, experiment with materials and processes, and develop new connections within the international ceramics community.

Katherina Perlongo (*1989 in Bolzano, Italy) is a Berlin-based curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and design. With experience in curatorial and leadership positions across institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art, her practice focuses on materiality, making, and the narratives embedded in objects.

The 6th Officine Saffi Award, Forms of Belonging (September 30 – November 13, 2026) presents works by Marten H. Anderson (Germany); Mel Arsenault (Canada); Arun Baburaj (India); Jonathan Baldock (United Kingdom); Gianluca Brando (Italy); Soledad Christie (Chile); Phoebe Collings-James (United Kingdom); Tomás Díaz Cedeño (Mexico); Andile Dyalvane (South Africa); Sean Gerstley (USA); Benedikt Hipp (Germany); Cody Hoyt (USA); Samantha Kerdine (France); Pan Loong (China); Corwyn Lund (Canada); Gerald Mak (Hong Kong); Agalis Manessi (Greece); Takumi Morozumi (Japan); Antoine Moulinard (Belgium); Bisila Noha (Spain / Equatorial Guinea); Trude Westby Nordmark (Norway); Ornaghi & Prestinari (Italy); Marta Pierobon (Italy); Yaerin Pyun (Republic of Korea); Coline Rosoux (Belgium); Emily Stapleton-Jefferis (United Kingdom); Krzysztof Strzelecki (Poland); and Flávia Vieira (Portugal).

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Captions

• Installation views, Officine Saffi Award 6 exhibition “Forms of Belonging” at Fondazione Officine Saffi, from 30th September to 13th November 2026, ph. Alessandra Vinci, courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Jonathan Baldock, It’s My House, and I Live Here, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Samantha Kerdine, L’étreinte (The Embrace), 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Gerald Mak, Over Persimmon and Tea, 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Ornaghi & Prestinari, Uscire dal guscio (To Come Out of One’s Shell), 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Agalis Manessi, It’s Behind You, 2024. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Marten Anderson, Held Together, 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Mel Arsenault, And All This Time We Were in Heaven, 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Cody Hoyt, (Untitled) Landscape Drawing Vessel, 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Pan Loong, Leaves, 2022-ongoing. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Takumi Morozumi, Abystrata, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Krzysztof Strzelecki, Labour IV – The Erymanthian Boar and the Death of Chiron, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Marta Pierobon, Cecilia #2 (Las Meninas), 2026. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Bisila Noha, Baney B60, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Phoebe Collings-James, The Infidel, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Andile Dyalvane, I Thwasa, 2024. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Trude Westby Nordmark, Ecdysis 6, 2024. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Tomás Díaz Cedeño, Columna, 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi

Anemoon On Fire (Anemoon Fokkinga, b. 2003) is a Dutch self-taught ceramic artist working primarily in porcelain. She began working with clay at the age of fifteen during a period in which health challenges prevented her from attending school, and has developed her practice independently through experimentation, research, and studio work.

After discovering ceramics in various studios between 2019 and 2021, Anemoon established her own studio, Anemoon On Fire, in 2020. The studio continues to serve as the center of her artistic practice, providing a space for experimentation with hand-built porcelain, colored clay, engobes, glazes, and surface techniques. Since her first exhibitions at the age of seventeen, Anemoon has built a rapidly growing exhibition record in the Netherlands and abroad. Her work has been presented at Art Rotterdam, Dutch Design Week, Prospects (Mondriaan Fund), the International Ceramic Art Fair in Jingdezhen, and numerous gallery and museum exhibitions focused on contemporary ceramics and emerging talent.

In 2022, she received a Kunstenaar Start grant from the Mondriaan Fund and support from the Cultuurfonds. International residencies have played an increasingly important role in Fokkinga’s development, including period at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida (2022–2023), a workshop at the Morean Workshop Center in St. Petersburg, Florida (2025), and residencies at Yiji Studio in Jingdezhen, China (2025 and 2026–2027).

A major milestone in Fokkinga’s career came in 2023, when curator Dr. Wendy Gers invited her to create a large-scale installation for the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The resulting project, Animals Far From Now and Beyond, was exhibited as part of Oracles from Far & Near (2024–2025). The museum subsequently acquired seventeen sculptures from the installation for its permanent collection. Her recent exhibitions include Evident Talent at Galerie Terra, in Delft, the Netherlands; the anniversary exhibition 16Up at 38CC, PROSPECTS in Rotterdam; the International Ceramic Art Fair in Jingdezhen, China; and the 2025 edition of the Dutch National Ceramics Prize De Kei. Inspired by extensive time spent in nature and by her experiences as a scuba diver, Anemoon On Fire continues to expand her technical and conceptual practice through new materials, processes, and international collaborations.

Visit Anemoon On Fire’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2022-2026

Anemoon On Fire creates ceramic sculptures that imagine how life might evolve in a future transformed by climate change and pollution. Fascinated by marine biology, deep-sea creatures, and speculative evolution, she invents new species that appear to have adapted to increasingly hostile environments. Her fictional organisms combine recognizable elements of existing animals with mutations driven by rising waters, plastic pollution, and other ecological disruptions.

Nature is both fascinating and concerning in her practice. Drawing partly on her experiences as a diver, Anemoon considers survival and adaptation as ongoing processes: some species disappear, others transform, and entirely new forms of life emerge. Personal experiences and inner anxieties also enter this imagined ecosystem, giving the creatures an emotional dimension as well as an environmental one.

Working primarily with porcelain, she builds highly detailed sculptures and develops their surfaces with engobes, oxides, pigments, and layered glaze combinations. The resulting works sit between scientific specimen and fantasy creature, proposing strange yet conceivable inhabitants of a world altered by human activity.

Anemoon On Fire: Selected works, 2022-2026

Anemoon On Fire creates ceramic sculptures that imagine how life might evolve in a future transformed by climate change and pollution. Fascinated by marine biology, deep-sea creatures, and speculative evolution, she invents new species that appear to have adapted to increasingly hostile environments. Her fictional organisms combine recognizable elements of existing animals with mutations driven by rising waters, plastic pollution, and other ecological disruptions.

Nature is both fascinating and concerning in her practice. Drawing partly on her experiences as a diver, Anemoon considers survival and adaptation as ongoing processes: some species disappear, others transform, and entirely new forms of life emerge. Personal experiences and inner anxieties also enter this imagined ecosystem, giving the creatures an emotional dimension as well as an environmental one.

Working primarily with porcelain, she builds highly detailed sculptures and develops their surfaces with engobes, oxides, pigments, and layered glaze combinations. The resulting works sit between scientific specimen and fantasy creature, proposing strange yet conceivable inhabitants of a world altered by human activity.

Captions

• Culter Cat, 2024, Handbuild porcelain and stoneware. The Culter Cat dominates the forests, both on land and in the water. Their powerful hind legs combined with the development of membranes between their toes make them fast swimmers, able to pursue their prey into the water. On land they are able to rush through the dense vegetation of the mangrove thanks to the razor-sharp protrusions which extend from the exposed skeleton at their shoulders. Together with their speed, agility and strength, the Culter Cat’s low-profile demeanour has granted it a position at the top of the food chain as the apex predator of the mangrove environment.
• The Dolabra Swine, 2025, Handbuild porcelain. In the future, the Dolabra Swine is widespread around the globe, but this one in particular is found in Asia. They use their downward-facing tusks to dig in the hard, rocky ground of the Yellow Mountains and among the fossilized roots in search of food.
• Misty Mountain Rat attacked by a Snowball Bat, 2025, Handbuild porcelain.
• Giant Bottle Shrimp, 2023, Handbuild porcelain.
• The Gulo Gulo Hoká (Gulo Gulo Bear Badger), 2025, Handbuild porcelain. The Gulo Gulo Bear Badger gets its name from its resemblance to a small bear, but has in fact evolved from the American badger. Due to climate change, the species has spread all over the continent. It’s a solitary animal and is mostly a scavenger, but it’s very much capable of killing prey much larger than itself, in some cases even bears.
• Helicophorus, 2023, Handbuild stoneware. This sculpture is 1.60 m high and was made for Prospects (Art Rotterdam 2024). Due to climate change and pollution, the water is rising and sloshing through the streets of New York. Therefore, creatures that normally live in oceans, rivers, and sewers come up through the manholes. These creatures have skin and health problems due to the polluted and poisoned environment. Rapid evolution allows them to turn this pollution to their advantage.
• Lichen Toad with Frogspawn, 2024, Handbuild porcelain and glasfusion. The Lichen Toad is covered by a fungal layer and lives in symbiosis with this fungus. The Toad and its fungal companion have established a mutualistic relationship which has evolved into an indivisible union.
• Blue Mangrove Marten female with cub, 2024, Handbuild porcelain and black stoneware. Part of the exhibition Oracles From Far And Near.
• Melanocetus, 2022, Handbuild porcelain and stoneware.
• Tasmanian Decorator Crab, 2023, Handbuild porcelain.
• Black Mangrove Rootpoint with Black TreeFrogs, 2024, Handbuild Black Stoneware and porcelain. Part of the exhibition Oracles From Far And Near.
• Cryptobranco Salamander, 2023, Handbuild porcelain.
• The Balaena Decem Trunci, 2022, Handbuild in stoneware and porcelain. Third prize in the National Dutch Ceramic Award 2022. Here you can see the Balaena Decem Trunci in development, preserved as a foetus of 8 months, a newborn specimen, and at 1 year and 3 years of age. The Balaena Decem Trunci can grow up to 24 meters and has 10 trunks. It’s a toothed whale, but they are true omnivores. With their trunks they suck over the bottom of the sea and the deep sea. The trunks contain a filter system that ensures that the edible parts are separated from the plastic particles. This plastic is stored and converted in a special part of the body. Once the animal becomes sexually mature, this plastic comes out in the form of large, long, luminous sails running down the length of the animal. In this way, it can find a partner to mate with even in the dark deep sea.
• Blue Mangrove Martens, 2024, Handbuild porcelain and black stoneware. Blue Mangrove Martens move in pairs and carry their young on their backs. They mate for life and raise their kits together. They have become highly adapted to live in mangrove areas; their special fur and layer of blubber under the skin allow them to transition between water and land without dysregulated internal body temperatures.
• Animals Far From Now and Beyond, 2024, Porcelain and Stoneware. Part of the exhibition Oracles From Far And Near, on display from November 30, 2024 to October 26, 2025 at the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. Created for a glass display case measuring 2.5 by 11 meters and accompanied by a specially composed soundscape, the installation transports viewers into a distant future inhabited by imagined species and unfamiliar ecological relationships. Due to climate change, the water has risen and the coastlines of the world have changed. Parts of the world are flooded and some parts have changed into mangrove forests and giant swamps. Animals had to adapt and evolve to survive. New species have emerged from these adaptations. The first thing that catches the eye is a sea of what looks like Waterlily leaves, but are in fact a new kind of crabs: the Lotusleaf Crabs. They come in different sizes and colors. The sea of Lotusleaf Crabs symbolizes the water level. Near the mangrove, the pencil roots of the black mangrove are visible. Under and above the water level, there are a lot of animals to discover.
• Lumen Swamp, 2026, Handbuild porcelain. Millions of years into the future, the swamps of China will have developed into a bioluminescent spectacle. This ecosystem is a feast for the eyes. Along the petrified trees, which are in the first stage of fossilization, glowing green lichen slithers. This slime is a life form in itself. Lotus Leaf Crabs dominate not only the coastlines, but evolved, smaller versions can also be found inland along rivers and in swamps. These Lumen Lotus Leaf Crabs have no eyes, but their sensitive tentacles sense vibrations in the air, they catch prey, and the acids in the slime digest it. Well-camouflaged moss frogs and small blue tree frogs inhabit this area in large numbers. When night falls, it is easy to see how many species exhibit glow-in-the-dark effects; both plant and animal.

The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (SCCP) in Japan is accepting applications for its 2027 Studio Artist program. Part of SCCP’s renowned Artist-in-Residence program, the call is open to ceramic and visual artists seeking time and space to develop their practice in Shigaraki. Around 20 artists will be selected for residencies between April 2027 and March 2028, with stays ranging from a minimum of two months to less than one year. Participants have access to studio facilities, accommodation, and technical guidance, with associated fees. Applications are open until October 31, 2026.

Hjorths Fabrik in Bornholm, Denmark, offers an Artist-in-Residence program for professional Danish and international artists working with ceramics. Based in the historic factory, which has produced stoneware since 1859, the residency gives artists three months to develop a project alongside the museum’s ongoing ceramic production. The residency admits two artists each year, with stays usually taking place in March–May or September–November. Residents receive accommodation, a creative workspace, and materials within reasonable limits, and are expected to contribute to the local community through an artist talk or event. Applications are due January 10, 2027.

Only a few days remain to apply to Ceramic Art London 2027, which returns to Olympia West Hall from May 6–9, 2027. Produced by the Craft Potters Association, CAL is open to ceramic artists from any country and showcases contemporary ceramics across a wide range of styles. Selected exhibitors will have the opportunity to present and sell their work in a major central London venue. Applications close at midnight on Sunday, October 11, 2026.

Congratulations to the winners of the sixth edition of the Officine Saffi Award! South African artist Andile Dyalvane received the €10,000 Main Prize for iThwasa (The One Who is Blossoming). The Residency Prizes, the Young Artist Prize by Ottostumm | Mogs, and the Tacchini Prize have also been announced. Selected from more than 1,000 applications from 41 countries, the works of the 28 finalists are on view in Forms of Belonging at Fondazione Officine Saffi in Milan until November 13, 2026.

Ceramic artists are invited to apply for Li Dièle 2027, the international ceramics market held annually in Andenne, Belgium, during Pentecost weekend. The next edition will take place on May 16 and 17, 2027, bringing together more than 70 ceramic artists from Belgium and abroad. The 2027 guest of honor is French ceramic artist Benoît Pouplard. Applications close December 6, 2026.

The Museum of Royal Worcester will host an online artist talk with Lisa Sheppy on October 14, 2026, at 6 pm. The free talk accompanies Sheppy’s exhibition Ornament Unbound: Tissue Transferware Reframed and explores how historic transfer printing, archival research, and Worcester porcelain have informed her contemporary ceramic and printmaking practice. Drawing on her doctoral research and the museum’s collections, Sheppy will discuss the exhibition, the role of engraved copper plates and pattern books, and the skilled labor behind Worcester’s ceramic heritage.

The team behind ceramic brussels has announced ceramic basel, a new international fair dedicated to ceramics and material-based practices. Its first edition will take place from June 15–20, 2027, during Basel Art Week, with around 65 international galleries across two sections: Fire and māteria. ceramic brussels has also announced the five laureates of its 2027 art prize: Daria Kowalewska, Dominik Adamec, Ioulia Chante, Jules Bouteleux, and Sojeong You. Their works will be presented at ceramic brussels, taking place at Tour & Taxis, Brussels, from January 20–24, 2027.

Grands Feux returns to La Borne, France, from October 17–25, 2026, for its 12th edition. Organized by the Association Céramique La Borne and the Centre céramique contemporaine La Borne, the event celebrates the local ceramic heritage through wood-fired kilns, firings, studio visits, exhibitions, performances, guided tours, talks, and workshops. Visitors can discover both traditional and contemporary ceramic practices, with exchanges taking place around artists’ studios across La Borne. The center will also present exhibitions by Myriam Bouchard and Sangwoo Kim during the festival.

The second edition of Ceramic Art Fair + Glass takes place October 20–25, 2026. Dedicated to ceramics and glass, the fair brings together international galleries and artists working across the arts of fire, from historic and modern works to contemporary creation. The event includes solo shows, conferences, and a sculptural off-site route in the gardens of the Maison de l’Amérique Latine.

Ceramics is also in the spotlight across several major art and design fairs this month. At PAD London, Adrian Sassoon and PIK’D will present contemporary ceramics within broader design contexts. At Frieze London and Frieze Masters, ceramic works appear in presentations by Jota Mombaça, Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo, and Maya Hewitt, with Frieze Masters also featuring works by Ken Price, Elizabeth Fritsch, Nicholas Homoky, and Anish Kapoor. Later in the month, some ceramic works will also be on view at Art Basel Paris, including several Lucio Fontana sculptures.

Book recommendation: Contemporary Ceramics: Twenty Key Themes by Jo Taylor. This book offers a unique opportunity to gain technical, practical and professional insights from leading international ceramic practitioners, inviting readers into their studios to understand the realities of daily practice. Organized around 20 accessible themes, it covers topics ranging from sources of inspiration and studio routines to firing techniques and building resilience in a ceramics career. Find the book on Amazon or Blackwell’s (for US readers).

Exhibitions

Discover these ceramic exhibitions that were recently featured in Ceramics Now.

• Joël Brodovsky-Adams: Like a Rumor at Superhouse, New York
• Hermann Grüneberg: The Ballad of the Fallen at Galerie Herold, Hamburg
• MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton
• Suspending the ephemeral at Galerie Terra Viva, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie
• Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte at the Jewish Museum, New York City
• Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers at Ballroom Marfa, Marfa
• Kiyomizu Rokubei: 250 Years of Ceramic Expression from Kyoto at Dai Ichi Arts, New York
• Ornament Unbound: Tissue Transferware Reframed at the Museum of Royal Worcester, Worcester
• tierra at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles

What’s on View

A selection of ceramic exhibitions currently on view around the world.

1. In the Name of Clay: 50 Years of Italian Ceramic Art at the National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana
2. Marianne Huotari: Voyage at HB381 Gallery, New York
3. Matsui Kosei: Master of Neriage at Margaret Howell, London. Presented by deBiousse & West in collaboration with Margaret Howell
4. Mae Engelgeer & Matsubayashi Hosai XVI: Echoes of Wa at Spazio Nobile Gallery, Brussels
5. Eun-Ha Paek: Currents at Chaos Contemporary Craft, Columbus, OH
6. ONREE: Memory Foam presented by Jinny Street Gallery in Tokyo
7. Annelie Stokke Grimwade: EUTIERRIA at Peach Corner Gallery, Copenhagen
8. 23rd Annual Ceramics Invitational at Abel Contemporary Gallery, Stoughton, WI
9. Dominique Ostuni: Would an Angel Apologize for Spilling Champagne? at Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME
10. Prix Avenir Céramique 2026 at Maison de la Céramique du Pays de Dieulefit, Dieulefit
11. Christopher St. John: Artifacts of the Delphinus Resonance at Central Campus Gallery, San Jacinto College, Pasadena, TX
12. Kensho: Taizo Kuroda & Sousai Inada at Tristan Hoare Gallery, London

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Featured image – Marianne Huotari: Voyage at HB381 Gallery, New York

Bianca MacPherson creates ceramic sculptures that explore identity, perception, memory, and the experience of existing between worlds. Drawing on her experience as a mixed-race Black woman, as well as personal and collective histories, she examines how identity is shaped by what we remember, overlook, assume, or claim as our own. Using abstraction, she transforms references from historical and personal photographs, illustrations, and archival research into forms that exist between recognition and ambiguity, inviting viewers to question how perception is shaped by their own experiences, assumptions, and histories.

Originally from Buffalo, New York, MacPherson’s work has been exhibited nationally. Selected exhibitions include Compulsion (2026) and Fractured Foundations at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California; the 2026 NCECA Conference exhibition, Volumes, in Detroit, Michigan; BLACK CLAY at ARTE NOIR Gallery in Seattle, Washington; and VIEWPOINTS: Ceramics at the Hyde Art Gallery at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California. She has also presented her work at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg, Virginia.

MacPherson was selected as a 2026 NCECA Emerging Artist and has led educational workshops throughout the United States, sharing both technical building strategies and conceptual approaches to making. She received her MFA from Pennsylvania State University and her BFA from Buffalo State University. She has participated in workshops and residencies nationwide, including residencies at Laguna Clay Company, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2025), Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and Penland School of Craft. MacPherson co-organized the Re-Mixed Residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in 2025 and serves as the Community Arts Representative on the executive board of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, fostering dialogue and advocacy around nuanced and multiracial identities through artistic and community engagement.

Visit Bianca MacPherson’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2025-2026

Bianca MacPherson: Selected works, 2025-2026

Existing between worlds requires navigating the projections of others while simultaneously constructing one’s own reality. As a mixed-race Black woman, I inhabit that space, negotiating the tension between visibility and erasure, belonging and ambiguity. This experience has become both the foundation of my practice and the lens through which I understand the world.

I work through historical and personal photography, illustration, and archival research to extract and abstract forms, contexts, and hidden patterns from the American landscape. I am interested in the quiet traces that reveal themselves through history, the layered memories and subtle presences that remind us that racial multiplicity has always existed. Through archival materials and my own familial histories, I explore perception, inheritance, and the ways identity is shaped by what is remembered, overlooked, or claimed as our own.

Rather than recreating these images, I use abstraction to loosen the certainty of the archive. I pull apart fragments, mirror forms, and distort imagery to create new relationships between history, memory, and perception. Abstraction allows these sources to move beyond documentation and become something more fluid, where multiple meanings can exist at once.

Clay became the material that could hold these questions. Its ability to move between fluidity and permanence mirrors the tensions I explore throughout my work. Through a slow coiling process, I build each sculpture layer by layer. The repetition is meditative, allowing the forms to develop intuitively over time. Rather than resolving these ideas, clay allows me to sit with them, giving form to uncertainty and inviting multiple interpretations.

In recent work, I have begun Rorschaching my forms, reflecting a fractured double consciousness. By duplicating, mirroring, and distorting images from historical sources, I fracture their original contexts while creating subliminal connections that persist through symmetry. The resulting sculptures exist somewhere between recognition and abstraction, asking viewers to consider how much of what they see comes from the object itself and how much comes from their own experiences, assumptions, and histories.

I work primarily in black and white, often color matching the archive from which the source inspiration emerges. This reductive palette mirrors the ways we often attempt to categorize and simplify identity, while simultaneously revealing the complexity that exists within those boundaries. The variations within these binary tones create space for contradiction, ambiguity, and the layered experiences that exist beyond fixed definitions.

Through both making and teaching, I move beyond the object itself, creating opportunities for deeper inquiry and conversation between material, history, and community. My work does not seek to provide answers or create a singular understanding. Instead, it invites viewers to embrace uncertainty, question perception, and consider what becomes possible when we allow space for complexity.

Captions

• Crossed, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 23” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Sentinel Mother, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 25” x 15” x 12”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Learning From The Night Bird, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 18.5” x 8.5”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Tender in Tiers, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 14” x 11” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Tender in Tiers, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 14” x 11” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Touch Not The Cat, But a Glove, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 20.5” x 16” x 11”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Learning From The Night Bird, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 18.5” x 8.5”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• The Standing One (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 15” x 11”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
• From Built To Breathing (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 23.5” x 13” x 10”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
• Sentinel Mother (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 25” x 15” x 12”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
• A Wish In The Grove, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, Black Sand, Metallic Pearls, 22” x 27.5” x 11.5”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
• From Built To Breathing, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 23.5” x 13” x 10”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• The Standing One, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 15” x 11”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• AIR 2026: COMPULSION at The American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California, 2026, Installation View, work by Bianca MacPherson. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Integration I, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 14” x 11” x 12” (Multiple Views). Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Pressure Points, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 10” x 10.5” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• Braids Too Tight, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 13” x 17”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
• TenderHead (Solo Exhibition), 2025, Installation View. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer
• Split Ends I, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 30” x 17” x 16.5”. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer
• Harmonic Divergence (Installation View), 2025, Ceramic Sculptures, Texture Glaze, Wood Hanging Sandbox, Black Sand, Auto-body Metallic Flakes, Black Chain, Soundbite on Plexiglass, (Left) 17” x 12.5” x 16.5”, (Right) 14” x 11.5” x 13”. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer

Joël Brodovsky-Adams: Like a Rumor is on view at Superhouse, New York

September 9 – October 17, 2026

Superhouse is pleased to present Like a Rumor, a solo exhibition by Joël Brodovsky-Adams. The exhibition brings together sculptural vessels and lighting that channel the energy of queer club culture into buoyant, gestural forms alive with the possibility of pleasure. Built entirely from wheel-thrown components and dressed in pattern, the works appear as both characters and elements of a scene: theatrical objects that seem to pose, gesture, or dance.

Essay by Michael Bullock

Swish is a movement before it becomes an identity. A loose wrist, a hip given too much latitude, a hand traveling farther than necessary, a particular way of standing or walking: boys learn remarkably young that such gestures have consequences. “You act like a girl” is never merely an observation. It’s a correction. Reduce the gesture. Control the body. Physical expression gets sorted into masculine and feminine, permissible and suspect, until learned restraint begins to look natural. The expressive boy exposes that fiction simply by moving through the world without self-censorship. Brodovsky-Adams gives the gesture back to the pot. His objects bulge, bend, reach, and spread themselves out. They put on outfits and lean into one another. Some seem perfectly aware that they are being looked at. Their relationship to the body is as much behavioral as physical. The vessel has acquired manners, though not the kind boys are typically taught to have.

In his Sunset Park studio, pots are everywhere, although some have wandered pretty far from the assignment. One rises on a long neck before erupting into a crown of swollen appendages. Another, glazed metallic silver, knots together a collection of bulbous wheel-thrown forms: necks become limbs, feet point in several directions, openings disappear into other bodies. You can still see the pot in there. There are simply too many of them. Elsewhere are lamps, vessels, hooks, and things that remain just recognizable enough. After all, a pot has responsibilities. It is expected to contain something, just as a lamp should illuminate and a hook bear the modest burden of a coat. Brodovsky-Adams has made a wall full of ceramic hooks that test the agreement. Some remain perfectly serviceable. Others have become so elaborate that their original function has been “completely … negated.”

The vessel remains a point of departure as Brodovsky-Adams moves deeper into sculpture. Even his strangest forms begin on the wheel. The pot remains recognizable, only less obedient to what a pot is supposed to do. The accusation of uselessness has always had a moral streak. In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos famously declared that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.” During graduate school, Brodovsky-Adams became preoccupied with the peculiar historical company kept by ornament and queer pleasure. Both have been dismissed as frivolous, insubstantial, excessive, and unproductive. Ornament exceeds what an object needs to function. Queer pleasure has been judged to fall short by conventional measures of utility.

Brodovsky-Adams encountered this hierarchy early. As a teenager, he became increasingly studious, filling his schedule until there was no longer room for art classes. He went to McGill, following what he now calls a “more traditional trajectory.” Yet during his first week there, he began taking wheel-throwing classes. Ceramics continued alongside it.

A lamp still gives light. A vessel can still hold something. His objects wonder what else usefulness might contain. Even Brodovsky-Adams occasionally catches himself resisting the impulse to push the decoration further. Dressing an object up can feel, as he puts it, like “a bit much.” Too much decoration, too much pleasure, too much gesture: the permitted amount has been exceeded.

Fashion gives Brodovsky-Adams another way of testing that limit. He speaks of “dressing” the objects, sometimes quite literally. A pattern from his favorite Eckhaus Latta shirt finds its way onto the surface of a ceramic form. Clothing passes from his own body onto the imagined body of the vessel. Pattern follows a curve, exaggerates a bulge, draws attention to one part while redirecting the eye from another. Among the images pinned in his studio is a photograph by designer Victor Barragán of a man in a Speedo, manipulated so that its pattern creates an optical illusion, exaggerating the curves of his buttocks. Decoration does not simply cover the body; it changes how the body is perceived. Brodovsky-Adams brings the same logic to clay.

The gay club is where these mannerisms received not just permission to exist, but communal applause. There, a gestural vocabulary sharpened. In Montreal, Brodovsky-Adams and his friends went to Sky, a three-story gay club with different music on each floor. “I mean, it was my coming out,” he remembers. At first, he wasn’t fully out; he would join his friends at the club without talking about why he was there. Eventually it became the place where he could feel desire, feel desired, and grow comfortable in his own body. When COVID closed clubs and that part of his life disappeared, nightlife entered his ceramics more directly. Photographs of friends drinking and dancing became source material. Eventually the figures receded, leaving behind the bodily intelligence of the room. A gay club permits movements discouraged elsewhere. Men pose, strut, swish, cruise, imitate, exaggerate, dress, and undress. Masculinity becomes available for play. The body recovers some of the expressive range it was trained to surrender. What begins as bodily freedom becomes something larger. Brodovsky-Adams thinks of “that tendency towards hedonism and pleasures as so inherently queer.”

People dress elaborately to enter a dark room where much of what they are wearing can barely be seen. Money is spent. Hours disappear. Bodies exhaust themselves. There is the look across the room, the dance, the touch, the stranger who becomes a friend or lover. The electricity of being alive is shared. By morning there may be little physical evidence that anything useful has occurred. José Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, “Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.” Queer history has often depended upon such traces. Gesture becomes evidence: the cruising look, the lingering handshake, the particular strut, small physical acts capable of carrying an entire social world. A cruising glance might last half a second. Fired in clay, it can last forever. Brodovsky-Adams takes this fleeting language and gives it lasting form. The work gives a specific cultural experience permeability, allowing it to travel beyond the room that produced it.

The exhibition extends that logic into space. Brodovsky-Adams imagined its entrance as the dressing room of a nightlife venue, with the larger gallery beyond as its stage or dance floor. It is the route of the performer rather than the audience: a passage from backstage into the room, where dress, gesture, and attitude become public. The conceit has grown more abstract as the work developed, but something of that transformation remains.

In the larger sculptures, several bodies become a crowd. They touch, separate, and return, each pot still discernible within a form unconcerned with where one ends and another begins. At thirty, Brodovsky-Adams is still close enough to what he inherited for its rules to remain visible, even as the contours of a life and practice distinctly his own come into view. The pot remains, which is precisely why its misbehavior matters. Making pleasure and joy central to the definition of usefulness is distinctly queer. “That’s the impulse with all of it.”

About Michael Bullock
Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and documentary filmmaker focused on art, design and queer culture. He is the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (Karma 2012), the editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (Damiani 2019), and co-editor of I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean Delear (Semiotext(e) 2023). Bullock serves as associate publisher of PIN–UP and The Whitney Review of New Writing and is a contributing editor to apartamento.

About Joël Brodovsky-Adams
Joël Brodovsky-Adams (b. 1995) is a ceramic artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and was recently an Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Brodovsky-Adams began working with ceramics in 2013 at L’aluminé in Montréal, Québec, and later completed a post-baccalaureate certificate at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2021. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a two-person presentation with Superhouse at NADA New York, a group exhibition at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, and a group exhibition at Sculpture Space NYC.

Contact
hello@superhouse.us

Superhouse
120 Walker Street, 6R
New York, NY 10013
Unites States

Photos by Matthew Gordon

MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition is on view at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA

March 28, 2026 – February 7, 2027

Fuller Craft Museum presents MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition, a striking exhibition that brings together eight contemporary artists who push the creative and structural possibilities of clay through repetition, accumulation, and inventive feats of construction.

Curated by Rebecca Cross, MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition explores how repeated gestures and serial forms can build sculptures of extraordinary scale and meaning. By building piece by piece, the artists transform clay from a familiar sustainable material into immersive sculptural environments that reflect on labor, time, and identity. Through patience, discipline, and sustained focus, the artists transform countless small gestures into monumental forms, revealing the meditative rhythm of making while inspiring reflection and appreciation for the power of craftsmanship.

Fuller Craft Museum Executive Director Jenn Chrzanowski shares, “We are thrilled to welcome MORE CLAY! to Fuller Craft to share with our patrons. This exhibition reminds us that the most powerful art is often built one small act at a time. It is a stunning reflection on labor, identity, and the transformative potential of clay in visionary hands.”

Participating artist Kate Roberts reflects on the delicate balance between strength and impermanence in her installation, Gates to Nowhere.“I wanted to create structures that initially look solid and imposing, but are actually fragile and capable of shifting or dissolving over time.” Suspended from above and built from thread-like strands of unfired clay, Roberts’ monumental gates invite viewers to consider thresholds, boundaries, and the fleeting nature of the environments we create.

MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition was first presented at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center and traveled to Fuller Craft Museum with support from the Hamilton Company Charitable Foundation.

The exhibition features work by Zimra Beiner, Bean Finneran, David Hicks, Kahlil Robert Irving, Walter McConnell, J.J. McCracken, Kate Roberts, and Vanessa Ryerse. Each artist employs repetition in a distinct way, whether by assembling hundreds of individual components, layering forms, or building intricate surfaces that reward sustained viewing. Together, their works reveal how the act of assembling multiples becomes a powerful expressive strategy, one that amplifies meaning, challenges structural boundaries, and invites viewers to reconsider the physical and conceptual possibilities of clay as a sustainable, contemporary material. Work by Brockton High School students is also included in the collaborative Homage to de Waal Wall.

A fully illustrated printed catalogue has been developed in conjunction with MORE CLAY!, featuring an essay by Fuller Craft Museum Artistic Director & Chief Curator, Beth McLaughlin. The publication will be available for purchase throughout the run of the exhibition and offers deeper insight into the artists’ processes and themes. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of The Hamilton Company Charitable Foundation and the Caroline R. Graboys Fund.

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Deirdre McLoughlin began working with clay in 1972, when she was handed a lump of clay and invited to make something. From the beginning, her coiled forms have been abstract in intent and feeling. Between 1981 and 1985, she developed her skills and language of form among the Sodeisha artists in Kyoto. From Japan, she travelled throughout China.

Sculpture, rather than ceramics in itself, has remained her main concern as an artist. Her work is shaped by ideas of space, balance, geometry, formal logic and material quality. Her forms have been described in different ways, including organic, abstract expressionist, biomorphic and minimalist, as well as edgy, touchable, elegant and humorous. She continues to explore physical movement through practices such as dance and meditation. Places where she has lived or stayed have also influenced her work, from the grey Irish landscape and the straight lines of the Dutch landscape to the volcanic energy of Hawaii. She developed a deep feeling for indigenous people in Indiana, while in Japan her work was considered to show the influence of Jōmon pottery.

McLoughlin’s first solo exhibition was held at Gallery Beni, Kyoto, in 1984. Her major institutional exhibitions include RECENT WORKS at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, in 1993, which travelled to Limerick City Gallery of Art and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, and SHAPING THE VOID, a 2012 Design and Crafts Council of Ireland exhibition that travelled to Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.

She was honoured at the Korean International Ceramic Biennale in 2007 and 2019, and was a two-time winner of the Ceramics of Europe Westerwald Prize, in 2004 and 2014. She is currently represented by Modern Shapes Gallery, Antwerp, and Taste Contemporary, Geneva, where she will have a solo exhibition in 2027. Recent group exhibitions have taken place in Oxford, London, Tokyo, Cork, and across five venues in Benelux between 2023 and 2026. In 2026, the Loewe Foundation and La Residencia Belmond awarded her a residency.

McLoughlin graduated with a BA in Humanities from Trinity College Dublin. In 2021, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College Dublin for her life’s work as a visual artist. She is based in Amsterdam.

Visit Deirdre McLoughlin’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2021-2026

Deirdre McLoughlin: Selected works, 2021-2026

Sculpture, rather than ceramics in itself, has remained McLoughlin’s main concern as an artist. Her work is shaped by ideas of space, balance, geometry, formal logic and material quality. Her forms have been described in different ways, including organic, abstract expressionist, biomorphic and minimalist, as well as edgy, touchable, elegant and humorous. She continues to explore physical movement through practices such as dance and meditation. Places where she has lived or stayed have also influenced her work, from the grey Irish landscape and the straight lines of the Dutch landscape to the volcanic energy of Hawaii. She developed a deep feeling for indigenous people in Indiana, while in Japan her work was considered to show the influence of Jōmon pottery.

Captions

• Keeping Still, 2026, Red stoneware, diamond polished, multiple firings, 20 x 19 x 35 cm / 7.9 x 7.5 x 13.8 in.
• Soft, 2025, White stoneware, diamond polished, multiple firings, 30 x 19 x 44 cm / 11.8 x 7.5 x 17.3 in.
• Black Dream, 2025, Stoneware, coil built, diamond polished, black slip, copper skin, multiple firings, 30 x 20 x 33 cm / 11.8 x 7.9 x 13 in.
• Touch, 2025, Stoneware, coil built, diamond polished, iron oxide on base, multiple firings, 26 x 12 x 28 cm / 10.2 x 4.7 x 11 in.
• Ruby Rocks, 2021, Red stoneware, coil built, diamond polished, multiple firings, 28 x 26 x 28 cm / 11 x 10.2 x 11 in.
• Queen, 2024, White stoneware, coil built, diamond polished, copper skin, multiple firings, 46 x 20 x 30 cm / 18.1 x 7.9 x 11.8 in.
• Naught, 2022, Porcelain, coil built, diamond polished, glazed within, multiple firings, 17 x 17 x 23 cm / 6.7 x 6.7 x 9.1 in.
• Nomad, 2024, Grey stoneware, coil built, diamond polished, copper skin, multiple firings, 24 x 24 x 12 cm / 9.4 x 9.4 x 4.7 in.
• Bare Bones II, 2022, Black clay, high fired, 38 x 30 x 35 cm / 15 x 11.8 x 13.8 in.
• Bare Bones IV, 2021, Black clay, high fired, 32 x 31 x 31 cm / 12.6 x 12.2 x 12.2 in.
• Touch, 2021, High fired, diamond polished, 29 x 25 x 24 cm / 11.4 x 9.8 x 9.4 in.
• Hope, 2022, Stoneware, copper skin, 30 x 20 x 30 cm / 11.8 x 7.9 x 11.8 in.

Photographs can make Edmund de Waal’s nine tiered white structure appear almost weightless, a pale field of vessels suspended in architectural calm. In the gallery, however, the shelving occupies the wall with the authority of architecture, and only afterwards do the cylinders, bowls, boxes and pale movements of celadon begin to detach themselves from the structure around them.

The title work (rain diary), made in 2025, contains 118 celadon-glazed vessels and fourteen porcelain boxes holding ceramic and silver fragments. Quantity sounds important when stated numerically, yet space dominates the experience. Forms gather and disperse across nine shelves, and a small change of height, rim or glaze becomes conspicuous because so little else competes with it. From a distance, the work is architectural; up close, it repeatedly returns to the dimensions of the hand.

Porcelain begins much earlier than the shelf. Before the vitrine and calibrated interval, there has been throwing, trimming, drying, firing and vitrification. Glaze has melted and moved, and forms may emerge subtly altered by heat. De Waal has spent decades making this difficult material history appear almost weightless. At Gana, the ceramics resist that impression. One cylinder inclines, another carries a softer lip, a low bowl opens unevenly, and pale surfaces change as the light moves. Repetition is disciplined but not mechanical. His pots belong to families rather than identical multiples.

The importance of the shelving needs to be stated precisely. Every exhibition arranges objects, but de Waal makes the enclosure itself part of the artwork. Move a pot, alter a gap or change the proportions of the shelf and the composition changes. The individual vessel no longer carries the whole burden of meaning within its rim, wall, foot and interior because part of that meaning migrates into the space around it. This has been one of de Waal’s most consequential contributions to contemporary ceramics. A solitary cup gains authority from surrounding emptiness, while grouped vessels begin to behave like a gathering. The shelf becomes part of the ceramic composition, and that achievement also creates a difficulty. Once the architecture becomes so important, it can begin to speak more forcefully than the vessels it contains. De Waal’s language is now highly recognisable, with pale cylinders, clusters, fragments, black and white enclosures and carefully judged intervals. The work is extraordinarily fluent, but in a mature practice even irregularity can begin to feel anticipated when every object enters such a resolved system.

rain diary gains force whenever fired material pushes against that fluency. A fractured edge, a broad bowl, a metallic plane, a black ceramic body or an awkward historical fragment prevents the work from settling into an elegant grammar of pause. These moments remind us that the objects entered the vitrine carrying events that occurred before arrangement began. Fire, chemistry and history have already acted upon them.

De Waal’s own account of the exhibition makes Korea central rather than incidental. He describes rain diary through ideas of home, sanctuary, migration, poetry and the movement of people, ideas and objects. Showing the work in Korea, he says, is both special and daunting because this is a culture of “a thousand whites and celadons”, with a ceramic history extending over many centuries. His relationship with Korean ceramics reaches back to his first studio. At twenty-one, he kept a postcard of a white Korean tea bowl above the wheel. He remembers its energy as if it were rising from the ground like a bird. “Its whiteness was plural,” he says, one hue moving into another, like dawn. That idea of plural whiteness provides one of the best ways into the exhibition. The newer white works make the point clearly because their whiteness is neither uniform nor confined to one vessel type. Tall cylinders appear beside squat forms, broad low bowls, compressed ovals and boxes filled with broken porcelain. White becomes a range of temperatures, surfaces and volumes rather than a symbol of purity.

The low bowls are especially revealing because their generous openings pull the eye into interior space in a way the upright cylinder does not. Nearby fragment boxes offer another interior, crowded with broken material rather than emptiness. One form holds space; the other holds remains. Elsewhere, upright porcelain forms are interrupted by an irregular reflective plane and a small metallic block. Porcelain absorbs light softly while metal returns it, disrupting the continuity of the white field and sharpening differences of weight and surface. De Waal’s description of Korean whiteness as plural therefore extends beyond hue. White appears as cylinder, bowl, box and shard. Thin walls sit beside thicker ones, upright forms encounter open vessels, and reflective metal disturbs absorbent porcelain. The exhibition is strongest when whiteness contains these differences rather than becoming an atmosphere of immaculate calm.

De Waal says that one has to reach towards poetry to come near the Korean bowl he remembers. Ceramics asks for another movement, towards clay, firing and glaze. Poetry may describe what colour feels like; ceramic history asks how it became possible. Celadon makes that distinction unavoidable. De Waal’s pale greens lend themselves easily to mist, stillness and restraint, yet celadon is first a technological achievement. Clay body, glaze composition, iron content, atmosphere and firing determine the colour that eventually appears. Its gentleness depends upon difficult material conditions. In Seoul, those conditions carry particular historical weight. Goryeo celadon belongs to one of the defining achievements of Korean ceramic culture, involving sophisticated kilns, glaze chemistry, courtly patronage and the refinement of sanggam inlay. The green therefore arrives carrying a history far denser than an atmospheric metaphor permits. To describe it simply as tranquil risks allowing technical knowledge to disappear behind mood.

The gallery lighting helps resist that simplification. Some surfaces appear cooler and greyer, while others become more aqueous. Glaze catches light differently from vessel to vessel, revealing variations in thickness, reflection and tone. The eye begins by seeing celadon as colour and gradually starts to see a sequence of fired surfaces. De Waal’s engagement with Korean ceramic history is most convincing when the material does not dissolve into his established visual language. Ceramic technologies have always travelled, so the issue is not cultural purity. The harder question is what happens when these histories enter the language of a major contemporary European artist. The strongest works preserve that unease rather than treating celadon as simply another available colour.

The broken celadon fragment in clouds over the river become rain sharpens this argument. Pale cylinders and rectilinear forms sit beside an irregular shard whose fractured edge exposes the ceramic body beneath the glaze. What had appeared as surface becomes structure. Wall thickness appears, colour separates from clay and the object reveals something about how it was made.

Ceramic culture has become remarkably comfortable assigning moral significance to breakage. A shard quickly becomes a symbol of survival, loss, resilience or healing before anyone asks what material has broken or what the fracture reveals. De Waal is more convincing when he leaves the fragment unresolved. There is no repair promising emotional closure, and the break remains a break. The fragment-filled boxes elsewhere in the exhibition complicate this further. Pieces that might normally occupy the floor beneath a studio bench or the bin beside a kiln are gathered, contained and placed alongside intact vessels. Their status changes through selection. A studio shard may be failure, evidence or rubbish; inside de Waal’s architecture it becomes protected material worthy of attention.

Kilns continually produce losses, most of which never acquire a biography. The vitrine distinguishes one fragment from thousands that remain unchosen, so preservation is also editing. The Joseon scholar Yi Ha gon adds historical depth to this question. His 1709 account of the royal Bunwon kilns admires finished porcelain while recording some of the circumstances beneath that refinement, including the movement of clay, significant rejection and compulsory labour. Such accounts restore process to objects whose perfection can make production invisible. Ceramics is unusually good at concealing the sequence that produced it. An immaculate surface can hide centring, throwing, trimming, drying, firing and selection. De Waal’s repeated throwing preserves some evidence of that sequence because his vessels resemble one another without becoming identical. The hand survives repetition.

The installation can then perform a curious reversal. Those deviations are absorbed into an architecture of exceptional precision. The pot retains evidence of bodily making while the shelf gives that evidence a controlled position. Two forms of order coexist, one produced through the uncertainties of making and another through arrangement.

In my own porcelain practice, developed alongside medical work, I have become increasingly attentive to the difference between error as harm and error as information. A warped rim, a glaze that breaks unexpectedly or a form that moves in firing can disappoint, but it can also reveal something about material, heat and judgement that a predictable result may conceal. This is partly why de Waal’s disciplined repetition interests me. His vessels retain small deviations, yet those differences are gathered into an architecture of remarkable precision. The question I bring from my own studio into rain diary is whether that architecture leaves enough of the kiln’s unpredictability visible. For a maker, error becomes meaningful not when it is romanticised, but when it teaches something the intended form could not.

The black vitrines intensify this question. They sit beautifully against the white works, but their role is more than chromatic. White disperses the eye across a bright field; black concentrates it. Forms emerge through contour, reflection and density, and the rhythm of the exhibition changes from expansion to compression. Coptic Light, I places dark porcelain, silver and Kilkenny stone inside a low black enclosure. Against darkness, ceramic forms cannot disappear easily into their surroundings. Curved vessels sit beside fractured mineral planes and small metallic elements catch the limited light. Another work from the Coptic Light group places a broad dark bowl before fossil-bearing stone, its pale geological trace appearing behind the vessel like an incomplete circle. The contrast lies between fired clay and geological duration, curved containment and fractured mass, human making and material formed on a vastly different timescale. Black brings de Waal’s porcelain back towards body and weight. White porcelain can approach optical disappearance, while the darker works insist that the vessel remains matter.

Kilkenny limestone pushes that argument further. Fossils persist without memory or an archive. For a potter, the encounter is resonant because clay is geological before it is cultural. Porcelain may reach the studio as a prepared body, but its constituents belong to processes far older than the maker.

The tall black cabinet precious beyond measure introduces another problem of historical distinction. Contemporary black porcelain appears with Song dynasty ceramic fragments and eighteenth-century Wedgwood Black Basalt. Their shared darkness creates immediate visual affinity, yet they are not one ceramic family. Wedgwood Black Basalt is a refined stoneware associated with Josiah Wedgwood’s technical and commercial ambitions. Song ceramics carry different histories of clay, kiln, glaze, circulation and connoisseurship. De Waal’s contemporary porcelain belongs to another technological and economic context. Blackness can create visual agreement, but it cannot create historical equivalence. The cabinet is strongest when those differences survive its elegance. De Waal is exceptionally skilled at producing coherence through spacing, tone and repetition. Objects separated by centuries can appear naturally suited to one another. Sustained looking disrupts that first harmony because the eye sees resemblance while material knowledge continues to insist upon difference.

Museums understand the power of adjacency: place two objects together and interpretation begins before the label is read. De Waal makes that mechanism part of the artwork itself. Lucie Rie concentrated intensity within the individual vessel, Hans Coper pushed the pot towards sculpture, and Alison Britton allowed constructed ceramics to remain unstable and visibly made. De Waal’s decisive move has been to distribute part of the ceramic argument beyond the vessel. Shelf, sequence, box and interval become active. The pot remains a pot, but it is no longer sovereign. The harder challenge for such a mature practice is whether refinement can continue to leave room for surprise.

The newer white and gold works offer one answer. Upright porcelain forms occupy pale box vitrines while narrow flashes of gold interrupt the field. Gold sometimes behaves as background and sometimes as punctuation, forcing the eye to search for it between porcelain forms. In Crevole, emptiness operates differently across two horizontal vitrines, with porcelain, silver and gold occupying a disproportionately large architectural field. Under the gallery lighting gold alters the temperature of porcelain, sharpening pale edges and making forms more corporeal. Its devotional associations are unavoidable, but so are scarcity, money and prestige. Reverence and wealth occupy the same material.

De Waal hopes the exhibition will encourage “slow looking” at the way histories and journeys weave together. The invitation is worth accepting, but slow looking also needs to become material looking. The poetry of a white bowl does not remove its clay body. Migration does not erase the technologies, labour and trade systems through which porcelain travelled. Sanctuary cannot be separated completely from enclosure, and gold does not cease to carry economic value because it enters a devotional language. This does not invalidate de Waal’s concern with vulnerability. Art has always existed within economies of patronage and collecting. The more useful issue is the relationship between protection and value. A fragment behind glass becomes important partly because someone has chosen to protect it; distance and rarity can intensify attention.

The title rain diary also changes when returned to ceramic process. Rain suggests atmosphere, journey, memory and home, yet water belongs to clay before metaphor begins. Too much water and a vessel may collapse, too little and clay becomes resistant. Throwing is a continuous negotiation between moisture and structure. A wet pot remains capable of becoming otherwise. Firing changes that condition because it is irreversible. Clay becomes ceramic, glaze melts into surface and small deviations become permanent. The vitrine performs another kind of fixing by determining where the fired object sits, what surrounds it and how it will be seen. The kiln changes matter; the vitrine changes relations.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most persuasive form of plurality lies in the way these different materials remain distinct. De Waal speaks of histories and journeys weaving together, but weaving does not require difference to disappear. The best works allow materials to remain recognisably themselves even while placing them in intimate relation. The danger is that silence becomes too perfectly composed. rain diary avoids that whenever material becomes difficult enough to interrupt the system. A shard exposes its body, a low bowl opens the architecture horizontally, metal breaks the continuity of porcelain, black ceramic gathers weight, fossil-bearing stone introduces time without memory, and celadon brings a history the contemporary artist can enter but cannot own.

These tensions are the reason to spend time with the exhibition. De Waal asks for slow looking, and the longer one looks the less serene the work becomes. Beneath its immaculate surfaces lie technical knowledge, rejected material, historical collisions, geological time, systems of value and the uncertainties of firing. The shelf determines how the vessel is encountered, but not everything it brings with it. Before reaching the gallery, the pot has already been changed by hand, water, atmosphere and fire. Historical ceramics have already travelled through production, trade and collecting, while stone predates the vitrine entirely.

That distinction gives rain diary its strength. De Waal has transformed arrangement into a ceramic medium without making arrangement all-powerful. His shelves can regulate pace, proximity and attention, and they can give a small vessel great presence or make a broken fragment newly precious. They cannot erase the material histories carried by what they contain. At Gana, the strongest arrangements understand that limit. They give each object a precise place while allowing something of its previous life to remain unresolved. The exhibition may begin in silence, but sustained looking fills that silence with glaze, fracture, labour, geology, memory and fire.

Anisio Veloso is a Brazilian-born British doctor, ceramic artist, and independent visual arts scholar based in the UK. He is currently working on a book, Where Error Does Not Injure: Medicine, Porcelain, and the Ethics of Attention.

Edmund de Waal: rain diary is on view at Gana Art Center, Seoul, between August 28 and October 4, 2026.

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Captions

• Installation views, Edmund de Waal: rain diary at Gana Art Center, Seoul, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Gana Art Center
• Edmund de Waal, rain diary, 2025, Porcelain, silver, wood, aluminium and glass, 214.4 × 260 × 13.5 cm / 84.4 × 102.4 × 5.3 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, Crevole, 2025, Porcelain, silver, gold, wood, aluminum, and glass, in 2 parts, 43.5 × 110 × 20 cm / 17.1 × 43.3 × 7.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, Coptic Light, I, 2026, Porcelain, silver, Kilkenny stone, wood, aluminium and glass, 51.4 × 95 × 20 cm / 20.2 × 37.4 × 7.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, Coptic Light, II, 2026, Porcelain, silver, Kilkenny stone, wood, aluminium and glass, 51.4 × 95 × 20 cm / 20.2 × 37.4 × 7.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, Coptic Light, III, 2026, Porcelain, silver, Kilkenny stone, wood, aluminium and glass, 51.4 × 95 × 20 cm / 20.2 × 37.4 × 7.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, if you came this way, III, 2025, Porcelain, gold, kaolin, wood and glass, in two parts, 37 × 61.4 × 14.9 cm / 14.6 × 24.2 × 5.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, if you came this way, IX, 2025, Porcelain, gold, wood, and glass, 20 × 21 × 7.2 cm / 7.9 × 8.3 × 2.8 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, if you came this way, V, 2025, Porcelain, gold, kaolin, wood, and glass, 37 × 30 × 15 cm / 14.6 × 11.8 × 5.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, if you came this way, VIII, 2025, Porcelain, gold, kaolin, wood, and artglass, 20 × 21 × 7.2 cm / 7.9 × 8.3 × 2.8 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, precious beyond measure, 2026, Porcelain, Wedgwood black basalt shards, Song Dynasty (960–1279) shards, silver, tin, steel, wood and artglass, 94 × 61 × 12.5 cm / 37 × 24 × 4.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, from yourself to yourself, 2026, Porcelain, gold, aluminium and glass, 70 × 42 × 10 cm / 27.6 × 16.5 × 3.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, I stood at that window, 2025, Porcelain, silver, wood, aluminum, and glass, 63 × 110 × 20 cm / 24.8 × 43.3 × 7.9 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, natura morta con sei oggetti, 2026, Porcelain, silver and aluminium, 19 × 45 × 12 cm / 7.5 × 17.7 × 4.7 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian
• Edmund de Waal, if you came this way, XIV, 2025, Porcelain, gold, kaolin, wood, and glass, 53 × 77 × 13.5 cm / 20.9 × 30.3 × 5.3 in. © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova. Courtesy Gagosian

Roxanne Jackson’s ceramic sculptures and installations are created as singular forms, some composed of multiple parts, yet they are not singular objects. They function more like words within a larger narrative: together they form a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, and ultimately an exhibition that unfolds as a complete mythological tale. It is a narrative filled with birth and death, destruction and resurrection, sacred objects and trash, violence and rapture. If this exhibition were a book, it would belong equally on the shelves of fantasy, horror, dystopian fiction, history, and magical realism.

Most of the sculptures, depicting various animals, objects, and a monster drawn from Greek mythology, are displayed on pristine white pedestals, creating a stark contrast to the elaborate, ornate, and maximalist aesthetic for which Jackson is known. A flayed lizard and two split feline heads hang on the wall, while a floor sculpture rises to seven feet in height. As viewers move among these works, countless questions emerge, perhaps the most central being: What happened here? The story is presented and the spaces left for interpretation are marvelously expansive. The exhibition invites us to inhabit those gaps, imagining our own connections, causes, and consequences within Jackson’s constructed world.

Any consideration of a Roxanne Jackson exhibition must also contend with her craftsmanship. The lustrous glazes that shimmer across the surfaces of vessels and creatures, the ambitious complexity of the sculptural forms, and the painstaking attention lavished on even the smallest details all speak to an artist deeply attuned to her material. Whether rendering a monumental creature or a seemingly incidental object, Jackson brings the same level of care and precision, creating works whose technical sophistication equals the richness of their narrative worlds.

The two split-skulled feline sculptures, Split Feline and Gilded Maw, depict fractured heads suggesting both fissure and revelation: a volatile transformation, or perhaps something long dormant breaking through from within. They appear as creatures caught in a state of becoming, neither fully alive nor entirely extinct. At the same time, they evoke guardians of hidden knowledge, their consciousnesses forcibly opened to expose what would normally remain concealed. The exposed interiors invite us to consider what lies beneath the surface, whether memory, trauma, wisdom, or instinct. The sculptures also call to mind the severed head of Medusa, which retained its power even after death. Like that ancient relic, these felines seem to possess an enduring agency, their wound transformed into a source of potency rather than defeat. The savageness of their division is inseparable from their authority, suggesting that knowledge, transformation, and power often emerge through acts of rupture.

One particularly arresting installation centers on a pelican whose body has been opened, its innards spilling across the surface of a low circular pedestal. Surrounding the bird are objects one might expect to find in or near the water: a seashell, a fish, a fish skeleton, shrimp, seaweed, and oyster shells. Interspersed among them are the traces of human presence: an eaten apple core, plastic bottles, fragments of packaging, aluminum cans, empty medicine bottles, tampon applicators, condoms, and partially eaten strawberries. Completing the tableau are objects that suggest a more sinister narrative, including a knife and additional organs placed alongside the pelican’s exposed viscera.

The pelican occupies the center of the composition while the surrounding objects are carefully spaced around it, transforming the pedestal into something akin to an altar, an archaeological display, or the site of a funerary ritual. Refuse, animal remains, consumer debris, and sacred offerings are granted equal status. Nothing appears ancillary. Each object seems imbued with significance, as though participating in a ceremony whose meaning has been forgotten but whose power remains intact. The piece resonates with what author Sophie Strand describes as “the animate everything,” a worldview in which animals, objects, bodies, histories, and myths are not inert symbols but active participants in a living network of relationships. The sculptures possess an uncanny agency. The pelican is not simply a victim, nor merely an ecological allegory. It becomes a conduit through which multiple stories converge: consumption and waste, sacrifice and desecration, mortality and renewal. The fish skeleton, the oyster shell, the discarded needle, and the plastic bottle all seem equally alive within the narrative logic of the work.

Also in this installation, the boundaries separating nature from culture, the sacred from the profane, and life from death are dissolved. The pelican’s opened body functions almost as a portal, exposing a world in which all things are connected through cycles of use, decay, transformation, and rebirth. It presents a mythology of entanglement, where every object, whether organic or manufactured, carries its own history and participates in a larger story about what humans leave behind and what the world remembers and asks us, startlingly, to slash our human superiority complex, as it’s creating quite a mess.

Perched atop the exhibition’s seven-foot-tall sculpture is a harpy in her nest, one of the most infamous creatures of Greek mythology. Traditionally depicted as part woman and part bird, harpies occupied a liminal position between the earthly and divine realms, serving as agents of punishment, messengers, and beings associated with sudden disappearance and ferocious transformation. Their names reinforce these associations: Aello, storm-swift, Ocypete, swift-wing, and Celaeno, the dark one. Like personifications of weather itself, they embodied forces that could not be controlled, only endured. In Ovum, however, the harpy feels less like a monster than a sentinel. Elevated above the other sculptures, she occupies a position of watchfulness, surveying the strange landscape that unfolds below. Her presence brings together many of the exhibition’s recurring themes: flight and earth, life and death, destruction and renewal, myth and material reality. The harpy is resonant within an exhibition populated by wounded creatures, discarded objects, relics, and evidence of transformation. In Greek mythology, harpies often arrived in moments of transition, carrying away souls, food, or even people. They functioned as intermediaries between worlds. Jackson’s harpy appears to serve a similar role, bridging different states of being. It overlooks a mythology where creatures are split open, shells are abandoned and reoccupied, and bodies continually shift between decay and regeneration.

Seen in relation to the exhibition’s broader themes, the harpy may also be interpreted as a guardian of deep time, arriving from a past that remains strangely alive in the present. Its perch atop the sculpture transforms it into a kind of witness, surveying the cycles of creation and destruction that animate this world. Neither entirely benevolent nor threatening, it embodies the exhibition’s refusal of clear distinctions. If the Ovum suggested by the exhibition’s title represents the potential for life and creation, the harpy seems to represent the midwife here for what emerges after birth: the unpredictable forces that shape destiny, transformation, and survival. Positioned at the apex of the exhibition, she becomes both messenger and oracle.

Another compelling work features a tarantula perched atop an empty turtle shell. Across cultures, the spider is associated with fate, weaving, hidden knowledge, and the unseen forces that connect all things. The tarantula in particular carries an added sense of unease, evoking fear, mystery. As a maker of webs, it becomes both architect and storyteller, spinning connections between disparate worlds. The turtle shell beneath it, associated with creation myths, endurance, protection, and longevity, often symbolizes the earth itself, a being that inhabits both land and water and mediates between realms. Here, however, the shell is empty. Its former inhabitant is absent, leaving behind only a protective architecture, a home transformed into a relic. The relationship between the two forms suggests a cycle of succession rather than extinction. The spider occupies the abandoned shell not as a conqueror but as a continuation, repurposing an old world as the foundation for a new one. The sculpture evokes an image of something emerging after catastrophe, patiently weaving fresh connections across the remains of the past. Together they embody a recurring theme throughout the exhibition: that endings are never absolute. What appears abandoned, broken, or extinct remains available for reimagining. Like many of Jackson’s creatures, this hybrid pairing seems to exist between worlds, part archaeological remnant, part mythological messenger, quietly spinning a future from the materials of the past. It also brings to mind the author Rebecca Solnit quote on climate change, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

The exhibition’s title, Ovum, is one of humanity’s most enduring symbols. As the cellular beginning of life, the egg is associated with birth, fertility, transformation, and the possibility of worlds yet to emerge. The egg is both container and threshold, holding within it the tension between what is known and what has yet to come into being. Jackson’s sculptures too inhabit a state of perpetual becoming. Like an egg, many of these works seem poised at the boundary between interior and exterior worlds. Breaking becomes a generative act rather than a destructive one.

Within this context, clay itself functions as a kind of cosmic egg. It is the substance from which the entire mythology emerges. Every sculpture carries the possibility of transformation, stating creation is not a single originating event but an ongoing process of beginning again, metamorphosis, and regeneration. Endings and beginnings are inseparable, every fracture contains potential and the work resists any single interpretive framework. They can be understood as mythological narratives, archaeological remnants, personal symbols, ecological allegories, or feats of ceramic craftsmanship all at once. They are objects where multiple histories remain active simultaneously, where the ancient and contemporary, the spiritual and material, coexist without cancelling one another out.

The power of myth lies not in its factual accuracy but in its capacity to endure, gathering new meanings as it passes through different eras and cultures. Jackson’s creatures, vessels, and relics seem to operate in this way. They feel both newly made and impossibly old, carrying stories that continue to evolve each time they are encountered. Clay, in this context, becomes more than a medium but rather a repository of time, holding together geology, history, belief, and imagination in material form. In addition to being the egg, the clay is also the bedrock. The sculptures seem less constructed than unearthed, as though they have risen from geological depths.

As permafrost melts across Arctic regions, long-buried remains of woolly mammoths, ancient horses, and other Ice Age animals are emerging from the earth, startlingly preserved after thousands of years. What was once accessible only through fossils, stories, and imagination is reentering the present. Visually, it’s like the earth itself appears to be remembering. Jackson’s sculptures evoke a similar sensation. Excavated rather than invented, surfaced from a forgotten epoch carrying traces of extinct creatures, sacred narratives, and ancestral knowledge. The exhibition suggests that the boundary between history and mythology is more permeable than we imagine. Fashioned from clay, itself a material drawn from the earth and transformed by fire, Jackson’s beings embody the possibility that what has been buried is never entirely lost. Ultimately, one must walk out of the exhibition but the story continues, both in our minds and seemingly, in the gallery as well. The exhibition answers another, quite satiating question too. What is always in a clay vessel? Nourishment.

Sarah Walko is an artist, director, curator and writer. She is currently the Director of Visual and Performing Arts at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House.

Roxanne Jackson: Ovum is on view at The Pit, Los Angeles, September 12-October 22, 2026.

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Photos courtesy of the artist and The Pit, Los Angeles. Photography: Chris Hanke

Captions

• Installation views, Roxanne Jackson: Ovum, The Pit, Los Angeles, 2026
• Roxanne Jackson, Split Feline, 2025, Ceramic, glaze, luster, 12.5 x 15 x 7 inches, 31.75 x 38.10 x 17.78 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Gilded Maw, 2026, Stoneware, glaze, luster, 14 x 20½ x 9 in., 35.56 x 52.07 x 22.86 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Pelican, 2026, Ceramic, glaze, luster, 4 x 48 x 48 in., 10.16 x 121.92 x 121.92 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Frilled Dragon, 2026, Ceramic, glaze, luster, 12 x 40 x 19 in, 30.48 x 101.60 x 48.26 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Harpy Candelabra, 2026, Ceramic, glaze, luster, carved black candles, steel base, 84 x 30 x 30 in., 213.36 x 76.20 x 76.20 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Disco Snake, 2026, Ceramic, glaze, luster, 20 x 23 x 16 in, 50.80 x 58.42 x 40.64 cm
• Roxanne Jackson, Trixie’s Vessel, 2026, Ceramic and glaze, 26 x 14.5 x 10 in, 66.04 x 36.83 x 25.40 cm