Susie Choi: Right Side Wrong Side is on view at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney

May 20 – June 13, 2026

Susie Choi is an artist working across ceramics, sculpture and installation on Gadigal and Wangal land. Born in Auburn to South Korean migrant parents, Choi’s latest body of work continues her exploration of materiality and perception. The interplay between hard and soft playfully dissects tensions around ide tity experienced by people of colour and children of migrants.

The inflated life preserver form, an icon ofthe Australian Summer, has been rendered hard yet fragile and decorated with silk cord in the colours of children’s traditional Korean hanbok clothing. Spheres and cubes reference aspects of material culture the artist grew up with, such as Korean vessels and cabinetry, while also speaking to memories of childhood learning and play.

This latest body of work presents a range of ideas, in flux, and at various stages. It comes out of my struggle to make sense of many things I care about and how this might make its way into the work. Like many of us, I worry every day about issues like polarisation, cohesion and safety, and I have to remind myself that art is one of these places where anything should be possible. In the privileged corner of the world that I live in, creation, imagination and making “mistakes” seem key.

As a primary school kid, my aunt taught me how to knit, and in high school I learned how to sew, and I’ve kept both practices going. It’s interesting now to open up material conversations in my art practice to include wool and yarn, as well as nostalgic fabric patterning, amongst the porcelain, nylon and silk.

When you follow a knitting pattern, you keep track of the right side (RS) and the wrong side (WS) so that you get what you expect and the stitches on the outside of your garment look “right”. I have wondered though how we decided upon what is the RS and WS of a stitch; despite having an intuitive sense of which way is “right”, I assume in some parallel universe it is reversed, you can decide which way you’ll do it or there is no such thing.

Susie Choi, 2026

Contact
gallery@sabbiagallery.com

Sabbia Gallery
609 Elizabeth Street
Redfern Sydney NSW 2016
Australia

Images courtesy of Sabbia Gallery

What if the vessel-versus-sculpture debate that has preoccupied contemporary ceramics is not merely unresolved, but unanswerable? Not a genuine question at all, but a category mistake: the philosophical error of treating one kind of thing as if it were another.

The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle first deployed the category mistake in The Concept of Mind (1949) to demolish the mind-body dualism that had dominated Western discourse since Descartes, rejecting the idea of the mind as a “ghost in the machine” separate from the body. He uses a famous example to illustrate this error: a visitor is shown around Oxford, sees the colleges, libraries, playing fields, and professors, and then asks, “But where is the University?” His error lies in the assumption that the University is the same kind of thing as a building, when in fact it is an organising principle rather than a physical entity. I want to suggest that “vessel” and “sculpture” operate the same way. They are not properties inherent in clay; they are not physical attributes we can isolate. They are interpretive frameworks, or institutional filing systems, that we project onto objects to organise our understanding. When critics look at a ceramic object and ask, “I see the clay, the glaze, and the form, but is it a sculpture or a vessel?”, they are making the exact error of the visitor to Oxford. They are waiting for the “Art status” to appear as a distinct entity, when in reality, “sculpture” and “vessel” are simply the ways we organise our interactions with the material.

So, what is the persistent ontology of these objects? We discover this by looking at the “clayness” of the object itself. While critical frameworks shift, the materiality remains stubbornly fixed; it has its own tendencies to crack or warp and absolute limits like the thermal transformation of quartz inversion. That transformation happens at 573°C regardless of whether the object is destined for a museum or a kitchen table. This material stability creates a unique professional condition. While the sculptor operates with a fixed context of Fine Art and variable materials, the ceramicist operates under an inversion. For them, the medium is stable but the context is fluid. The ceramicist stays faithful to one material, but that material demands they walk through different institutional doors: the factory, the kitchen, the building site, and the museum. They are materially monogamous, but institutionally promiscuous.

These categories and hierarchies did not arrive with the clay. They were built into Western cultural institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: museum departments, funding bodies, degree programmes, professional organisations. The South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) was founded in 1852 explicitly to serve the “applied” and “decorative” arts, terms that encoded a secondary relationship to “Fine Art” from the start. A century and a half later, we still navigate museums whose floor plans make the category mistake concrete: turn left for painting and sculpture, turn right for ceramics and textiles. It is worth noting that the Cartesian dualism Ryle originally attacked, mind separated from body, thought from matter, and the aesthetic hierarchies it spawned are not universal. They are a specifically Western inheritance. Where Western aesthetics inherited a hierarchy that placed intellectual conception above manual execution, other ceramic lineages organised themselves around material transmission: technique passed from master to apprentice, knowledge held in the hands. The vessel/sculpture question simply does not arise in the same way when the framework was never dualist to begin with.

If we accept that “vessel” and “sculpture” are institutional categories rather than material truths, we must examine how artists have historically navigated them. The dominant Western narrative of the 20th century was one of rupture. The American ceramic revolution, led by Peter Voulkos in the 1950s, was predicated on a violent rejection of the vessel to achieve the status of sculpture. Voulkos did not transform the field by revealing the ontology of clay; he transformed it by mobilising the critical framework of Abstract Expressionism. His strategy was oppositional. To make a work like Rocking Pot (1956) read as art, he had to physically attack its utility. He slashed, stacked, and punctured the clay, treating the vessel as a prison from which the “art” had to be liberated. This approach, while historically significant, reinforced the very binary it sought to escape. By defining his sculpture through the destruction of the vessel, Voulkos inadvertently confirmed the category mistake. He accepted the premise that a pot could not be art unless it was broken. In the language of Ryle, it was as if Voulkos believed the University could only be found by burning down the colleges.

Contrast this with the more recent response of Liu Jianhua. Working within the lineage of Jingdezhen, the historic centre of global porcelain production, Liu does not seek to break tradition but to liquefy it. In his Square series, pools of porcelain are presented on industrial steel squares, luminescent with gold lustre. Unlike Voulkos, who imposes his ego onto the clay through gestural violence, Liu steps back to allow the material its own agency. He utilises porcelain, the most rigid and historically loaded of ceramic materials, but denies it a fixed form. In Square, the porcelain appears as a liquid spill, a molten golden pool that seems to have just arrived on the steel surface. There is no vessel to break because the material has refused to become one. It exists in a state of ontological suspension, capturing the moment the slip spreads under the laws of fluid dynamics before it is immortalised by the heat of the kiln.

What theoretical vocabulary do we have for this relationship between human intention and material behaviour? Karen Barad, a feminist theorist and physicist, offers one in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). She develops the concept of intra-action to challenge our ordinary assumptions about how things relate. In standard interaction, two separate entities meet and affect each other while remaining fundamentally distinct. Intra-action is more radical: the entities themselves do not precede their encounter but emerge through it. Subject and object, maker and material, come into being together.

Liu’s Square series is intra-action made visible. The artist does not impose form onto passive porcelain. Instead, he creates the conditions: the slip, the steel surface, the pull of gravity, and then withdraws. What emerges is not Liu’s design but the record of an encounter: porcelain and gravity and surface tension negotiating a form that none of them could produce alone. The golden pool is not shaped; it is what happened.

But Barad’s framework extends further. She argues that the apparatus of observation is never neutral; it participates in producing what it claims to merely describe. Applied to our question, this means that the museum department, the gallery label, the critical language we use, these are not transparent windows onto a pre-existing object. They are themselves part of the apparatus that produces “vessel” or “sculpture” as seemingly stable categories. When a curator places a tea bowl in a vitrine labelled “ceramics” and a slashed Voulkos in a gallery labelled “modern sculpture,” the institution is not recording a difference that exists in the clay. It is making that difference through the act of framing. When we view ceramics through the lens of intra-action, the category mistake dissolves completely. The question is no longer “Is this a vessel or a sculpture?” because those categories assume stable, pre-existing identities. Instead, we ask: how is the matter acting, and what apparatus are we viewing it through?

If Voulkos attacked the vessel to make it sculpture, and Liu dissolved the vessel to reveal the material, contemporary practitioners like Takuro Kuwata and Magdalene Odundo prove that the vessel can possess the intellectual density of sculpture without renouncing its identity. They do not ask “Is this a vessel?”; they force us to ask, in the words of Bill Brown, “What is this Thing?”

Takuro Kuwata’s work inhabits the strictest of all ceramic institutional filing systems, the Japanese tea ceremony, which is the spiritual heart of the Mingei folk craft tradition. In this context, a bowl is traditionally expected to be quiet, humble, and earthy. Yet, Kuwata’s bowls appear to be exploding, forcing the sober spirituality of the tea room into a collision with the synthetic, technicolour excess of contemporary Japanese Pop culture. He utilises the ishihaze or “stone explosion” technique, allowing stones within the clay to burst through the surface during firing. He also applies thick, molten glazes in metallic golds or vivid neon pinks that slip and crack, purposefully defying the maker’s control. This is wabi-sabi amplified to a state of hyper-materiality.

Under the traditional binary, we might try to categorise these as failed vessels or abstract sculptures. However, applying Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” (2001) offers a more precise reading. Brown argues that we look through objects when they function for us, like the transparent vessel, but we confront them as Things when they stop working, such as when a tool breaks or a car stalls. Kuwata’s bowls hover in this disruption. The glaze does not coat the form; it overwhelms it. The stones do not support the wall; they rupture it. This is not merely an aesthetic choice, it is an ontological one. Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman (2008) offers a vocabulary for this disruption. Sennett argues that skilled making is not the elimination of resistance but a dialogue with it, that “salutary failure,” where things go wrong in instructive ways, is central to how craft knowledge develops. Kuwata’s practice embodies this principle at an extreme register. By inviting the clay to rupture and the glaze to overwhelm, he engages in what Sennett, building on the foundations David Pye (1995) laid when coining the phrase, calls the “workmanship of risk” that forces the material to assert its agency. The resulting object is neither just a cup nor just a statue. It is a material event. It refuses to be a transparent vehicle for tea, having instead become a “Thing” that asserts its own volatile presence.

If Kuwata disrupts the vessel through rupture, Magdalene Odundo disrupts it through silence. Standing before her work at Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2024, I found myself gripped by a forbidden impulse: I wanted to touch them. The burnished surfaces had the quality of those bronze sculptures that punctuate European squares, boars, saints, lucky toes, rubbed gold by generations of hopeful hands. I noticed the knobs on the forms registering in my body before my mind could name them, some read as vertebrae, others as navels. The angled, looping necks created a negative space where a head should be. I caught myself imagining what it would feel like to scream into one of these openings, and then, stranger still, the sense that they might already hold the exhalations of others. The gallery had become, without announcement, a spiritual site. I was not asking whether these were vessels or sculptures. The question had simply become unavailable to me. I was too busy being experiencing the work.

Odundo’s coiling forms are undeniably vessels; they possess interiors, lips, and bellies. Yet to categorise them as craft due to their hollowness, or as sculpture due to their form, is to commit Ryle’s category mistake once again. Odundo’s work operates through what Richard Sennett describes as anthropomorphosis, the projection of the human body into the material, not as a picture, but as a presence. This is achieved through her refusal of glaze. Instead of masking the clay with a glassy layer, she painstakingly burnishes the surface by hand using a stone or pebble. This repetitive, labour-intensive compression of the clay platelets aligns the material itself rather than coating it. It forces the skin of the vessel to become the primary site of interaction, creating a surface that feels as vulnerable and porous as the human body.

This focus on the vessel-as-body is deeply rooted in West African ceramic traditions, particularly those of the Gbagyi people of Nigeria and the potting communities of Kenya and Uganda. In these narratives, the vessel is not a mere domestic tool; it is a repository for spirit, a surrogate for the human form, and a participant in ritual transition. Within many African and Islamic lineages, the distinction between a ritual framework and an aesthetic framework simply does not exist. Where Western art history sought to separate the functional from the contemplative, these traditions understand the vessel as the highest form of sculptural expression precisely because of its utility and its relationship to the body.

In this context, the aniconic tradition, where the depiction of sentient beings is often restricted, elevates the vessel to a position of profound symbolic weight. The pot does not need to represent a person because it already intra-acts as one. When we stand before an Odundo vessel, we are not looking for the University, the institutional label of Art, to validate the experience. We are confronting the building, the undeniable physical reality of the object itself. It establishes what Sennett calls a politics of presence, a work declaring “I exist” without needing the validation of a Western gallery label to confirm its status.

My own practice operates in this contested space. In Health, Wealth, Virtue, Long Life and an Easy Death, I make fortune cookie sculptures, forms that cite the vessel’s ritual logic while refusing its containment. The fortune cookie is already a category mistake made material: an American invention persistently misrecognised as Chinese, a food that exists to be broken, a container whose purpose is to release language rather than hold substance. My versions split open like mouths, white crawl glaze cracking across their surfaces, red fringing spilling from the interior; hair, entrails, the unspoken remainder. They are vessels; they possess interiors, lips, openings, but they hold prophecies rather than tea. The blessing of the title asks for everything; what emerges is something else entirely. Like Kuwata’s tea bowls, they inhabit a ritual framework, but one borrowed, translated, and deliberately misread.

The long-standing preoccupation with the vessel-versus-sculpture debate has often served as a distraction from the material reality of the entangled encounter. By applying Gilbert Ryle’s concept of the category mistake, we can see that these terms are not inherent properties of the object but are instead institutional filing systems that we project onto them. Whether we are looking at the Abstract Expressionist ruptures of Peter Voulkos, the golden liquid ontologies of Liu Jianhua, the material events of Takuro Kuwata, or the silent presence of Magdalene Odundo, the clay itself remains indifferent to our labels. The identity of the ceramic object is not a fixed state but a site where multiple frameworks co-exist. The ritual power of a West African form, the industrial history of Jingdezhen porcelain, the aesthetic demands of the contemporary gallery, and the domestic intimacy of the tea bowl are not mutually exclusive. They are layers of meaning that can be activated simultaneously.

In this light, the vessel didn’t die; it simply became a quantum state, an object capable of being many things at once depending on the framework through which it is viewed. This reframing demands a new curatorial language, one that can juxtapose old and new, east and west, functional and non-functional, without requiring objects to declare allegiance to a single category. In July I will be in Jingdezhen, where seventy-two trades once collaborated on a single object and the vessel/sculpture question never needed asking. Perhaps it never needed asking anywhere.

Olivia Fero is a ceramicist-theorist whose practice exposes the vessel/sculpture divide as a category mistake. Through making, writing, and curating, she demonstrates how ceramics operate as material philosophy, challenging Western hierarchies while opening space for multiple ontologies to coexist. Her work, influenced by YBA provocations and new materialist theory, uses clay to think through false binaries that limit both ceramic discourse and broader cultural narratives.

Fero graduated from Goldsmiths, London in Fine Art and History of Art in 2009, and she is currently studying for an MA in Ceramic Design at the University of Pecs in Hungary, and intends to pursue doctoral studies in practice-led research. She is represented by Ancora Gallery, Pécs.

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References

• Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Bonacina, A. (ed.) (2019) Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things. London: InOtherWords. [Exhibition catalogue, The Hepworth Wakefield]
• Brown, B. (2001) ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28(1), pp. 1–22.
• Miller, S. (2024) Magdalene Odundo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Published in association with the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto]
• Perchuk, A. and Adamson, G. (eds.) (2016) Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years. New York: Black Dog Publishing. [Exhibition catalogue, Museum of Arts and Design]
• Pye, D. (1995) The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Revised edn. London: The Herbert Press
• Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.
• Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane.

Porcelain Reconsidered is on view at Vessels + Sticks, Toronto

May 13 – June 20, 2026

Porcelain Reconsidered brings together contemporary artists working with porcelain in ways that move beyond its traditional associations with delicacy, purity, and perfection.

Shaped over time by technical innovation, cultural exchange, and shifting ideas of refinement, porcelain carries a complex history. To work with it today is to work in relation to that history. Rather than reinforcing inherited perceptions, the works presented expand the material’s possibilities structurally, conceptually, and materially.

Across the exhibition, porcelain becomes a site of tension: between fragility and strength, control and unpredictability, tradition and experimentation.

What emerges is not a rejection of the material’s past, but a repositioning of it. Porcelain is treated not as a fixed tradition, but as an evolving language that allows artists to question, extend, and rework what has been established. In doing so, the works reflect a broader moment of reconsideration: what is worth retaining, and what might be reimagined.

Alongside contemporary works by Robin DuPont, Faye Hadfield, Loren Kaplan, Helena Lacy, Linda Lencovic, Sophie Manessiez, Ricca Okano, Réjean Peytavin, Arkadiusz Szwed and Heather Waugh Pitts, the exhibition includes porcelain pieces from the 1970s by artist, Harlan House. House’s works offer a historical point of reference, situating the exhibition within a longer continuum of material inquiry across generations.

Contact
info@vesselsandsticks.com

Vessels + Sticks Gallery
112 Avenue Road
Toronto, Ontario M5R 2H4
Canada

Photos by Seth Stevenson

Mingshu Li (b. 1994) is a Chinese ceramic artist based in Oslo, Norway. She completed her Master’s degree in Medium and Material Based Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in 2020. Her practice explores non-traditional approaches to clay through sculptural structures shaped by airflow, repetition, and extrusion-based processes.

Working between cultural contexts, Li approaches ceramics as a material language for reflecting on identity, migration, and the relationship between form and place. Her recent projects investigate the historical movement of ceramic patterns between China and Europe, treating decoration as a carrier of cultural memory and transformation rather than a fixed surface element.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in several public collections, including KODE Art Museums (Norway), Jingdezhen Ceramic University Museum (China), the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy), the Municipal Art Collection of El Vendrell (Spain), and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Art Collection.

Visit Mingshu Li’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

The strawflowers’ journey, 2025-2026

Reforming the strawflower, 2024-2026

Where Air Flows, 2019-2023

Mingshu Li: The strawflowers’ journey, 2025-2026

This project investigates the migration of the Strawflower motif from Chinese blue-and-white porcelain to Germany, Denmark, and Norway through historical research and ceramic practice. By tracing the transformation of this pattern across cultures, the project explores how ornament carries histories of trade, adaptation, and cultural identity. The resulting ceramic sculptures, porcelain objects, and installations engage with history through material processes such as repetition, fracture, and transformation, functioning as material evidence where written archives are incomplete.

The research began during a residency in Porsgrunn, where I first encountered the Strawflower motif in a Norwegian context. Although blue-and-white ceramics shaped my childhood in China, the European history of this pattern was absent from my earlier education. This delayed recognition now informs my artistic approach and connects personal migration with the movement of patterns across borders.

As a Chinese-born ceramic artist living and working in Norway, I bring a perspective that bridges both the motif’s origin and its European transformations, contributing a cross-cultural and material-based perspective to contemporary ceramic discourse.

Captions

• The strawflowers’ journey, 2026, solo exhibition at SKOG in Oslo, photo by Jon Gorospe
• The strawflowers’ journey, 2026, solo exhibition at SKOG in Oslo
• Dropping Seeds #group, 2026, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size
• Dropping Seeds #group, 2026, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size
• Dropping Seeds #group, 2026, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size
• The strawflowers’ journey #group, 2026, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size, photo by Jon Gorospe
• The strawflowers’ journey #11, 2026, porcelain and glazes, 28x25x25 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #10, 2026, porcelain and glazes, 22x30x30 cm, photo by Jon Gorospem
• The strawflowers’ journey #12, 2026, stoneware and glazes, 28x25x25 cm
• Dropping seeds #1, 2025, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, 23x32x22cm, photo by Jon Gorospe
• Soft Collapse, 2026, stoneware and cable ties, 135x95x1cm and 130x95x1 cm, photo by Jon Gorospe
• Still Carrying Blue #group, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size, photo by Jon Gorospe
• Still Carrying Blue #group, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size, photo by Jon Gorospe
• Still Carrying Blue #group, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, variable size

Mingshu Li: Reforming the strawflower, 2024-2026

During an artist residency in Porsgrunn, I encountered the straw pattern (Stråmønster), a motif with a fascinating cross-cultural history that spans continents and centuries. Originally inspired by the chrysanthemum designs on Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, this pattern was simplified by Meissen porcelain manufacturers in 18th-century Germany. By the late 19th century, it had traveled through Denmark, where the Royal Copenhagen factory combined it with Japanese motifs, and eventually arrived in Norway, where it became a hallmark of Porsgrund Porcelain Factory.

The story of the straw pattern cannot be uncovered purely from an Eastern perspective, at least it was never touched upon in Chinese art history classes. It’s a story I could only understand after personally coming to Norway. Six years later, I finally recognized this strawflower. What kind of trials has it gone through, how many versions has it been changed into, and how many languages has it been mixed with? Time has draped this flower in a splendid cloak, turning its story into something romantic. But only the flower itself knows the hardships of its journey.

The story has now blended with my own language, expressed through the media and material most familiar to me in the form of ceramic sculptures. I’m using art to fill the gaps left by written records, trying to depict this journey in its entirety.

Captions

• The strawflowers’ journey #1, 2024, stoneware, glazes, adhesive, silver foil and lacquer, 24x25x25 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #2, 2024, porcelain, glazes and stains, 23x21x20 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #3, 2024, porcelain, glazes, adhesive, silver foil and lacquer, 30x28x22 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #4, 2024, stoneware and glazes, 33x25x23 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #6, 2025, stoneware and glazes, 20x31x56 cm
• Dropping seeds #1, 2025, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, 23x32x22cm
• Dropping seeds #2, 2025, porcelain and glazes, 28x33x28 cm
• The strawflowers’ journey #5, 2025, porcelain, glazes and stains, 34x28x24 cm, photo by Josef Konczak
• Dropping seeds #3, 2025, porcelain, stoneware and glazes, 28x20x20 cm
• Dropping seeds #5, 2026, porcelain and glazes, 35x32x31cm
• Still carrying blue #1, 2026, stoneware and glaze, 39x30x30 cm
• Still carrying blue #2, 2026, porcelain and glazes, 43x40x40 cm

Mingshu Li: Where Air Flows, 2019-2023

At the center of my artistic practice are ceramic sculptures built around two core themes: “holes” and “airflow.” These technical elements become metaphors for broader artistic and existential explorations. Technically, holes allow air to escape from inside of clay sculptures during the firing process. This airflow prevents the internal air pressure from causing the sculpture to crack or explode under extreme heat in the kiln. While typically placed discreetly at the base or hidden in corners, these holes in my work take on greater significance.

Historically, when human beings started to produce wood-fired containers, they controlled the airflow to influence the final outcome, leaving visible traces of fire on the ceramic surface. Even in the electric kilns, air continues to circulate, interacting with each piece. In this way, a hole in a sculpture function much like an umbilical cord, connecting the air inside the form with the air in the kiln, mirroring the way a fetus receives oxygen through the mother.

I embrace the materiality of clay in its broadest sense, continually exploring diverse techniques and approaches to shaping it. The clay extruder is a tool seamlessly merging “holes” and “airflow” in one fluid motion: extrusion. As clay meets the extruder, its reaction shows its inherent strength. Air bubbles burst within, etching airflow tales onto the tubular form. These tubes, whether shaped by hand or through the extruder, are constant elements throughout my works. They are like threads weaving and connecting the concepts together, building the skeleton for my works, waiting to be filled with flesh and life.

Captions

• Black Form: Where Air Flows, 2023, stoneware, 43x42x60 cm
• Black Form: Where Air Flows, 2023, stoneware, 43x42x60 cm
• Blue Form: Where Air Flows #pp, 2023, stoneware, 53x41x15 cm
• Gray Form: Where Air Flows, 2020, stoneware, porcelain and stains, 46x53x47 cm,
• Reduction Tube Shape, 2019, stoneware, 45x47x85 cm
• Wheat Tube Shape, 2021, porcelain and stains, 28x33x46 cm, photo by Alf-Georg Dannevig
• Black Tubes’ Form #3, 2022, stoneware and glaze, 24x20x23 cm
• Blue Tubes’ Form #PP, 2023, porcelain, stains and glaze, 48x30x35 cm
• Green Tubes’ Form #PP, 2023, porcelain, stains and glazes, 33x25x24 cm
• Pink Tubes’ Form #pp, 2023, porcelain and glazes, 58x39x41 cm, photo by Kamil Kak
• White Tubes’ Form #3, 2022, porcelain and glazes, 44x30x28 cm
• Blue Tubes’ Form #2, 2022, stoneware and glaze, 40x34x34 cm

Artists are invited to apply to THROW/BACK, the 2027 NCECA Annual Exhibition, curated by Adriana Proser and Ellen Hoobler and presented at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, from March 10 to June 6, 2027. Running alongside CHARM, the 61st NCECA conference, the exhibition explores how ceramic artists navigate continuity and change, preserving and transforming forms, materials, and cultural histories across time. Open to artists from around the world, the call welcomes applicants aged 18 and older working primarily with clay, including mixed-media and selected video works where ceramic processes remain central. The deadline to apply is June 17, 2026. NCECA members may apply free of charge, while non-members pay a $50 entry fee.

Emerging ceramic artists in the United States are invited to apply for the 2026 Chrysalis Award, presented by the James Renwick Alliance for Craft. Now in its 10th year, the award supports artists in the early stages of their careers who demonstrate excellence and a strong commitment to developing their practice. This year’s edition focuses on ceramics, with the recipient receiving a $5,000 unrestricted award, a one-year JRACraft membership, and the opportunity to present their work at a JRACraft event. Applications close August 23, 2026.

The Gardiner Museum presents the International Ceramic Art Fair (ICAF) from May 28 to August 16 in Toronto, expanding its biennial programme from a 10-day event into a 12-week platform exploring contemporary ceramics through art, design, technology, and community. Centered on the theme “the city and the commons,” the fair brings together Canadian and international artists, including Ronald Rael, Sharif Farrag, Hadi Jamali, Jolie Ngo, Christine Howard Sandoval, and Anders Herwald Ruhwald, alongside exhibitions and workshops. Highlights include the ICAF Symposium (May 29–30), featuring keynote speaker Ronald Rael on emerging technologies and ancestral building practices, as well as panels examining ceramics, architecture, and shared space.

The Ceramics Research Centre-UK, in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, invites audiences to Permanence/Impermanence: Collecting & Archiving Contemporary Clay Practices, taking place at the University of Westminster, London, from June 24–26, 2026. The three-day conference explores how ephemeral, site-specific, participatory, and live clay practices can be collected, archived, and made accessible to future audiences. Speakers include Florence Peake, Louisa Buck, Alun Graves, Phoebe Cummings, Clare Twomey, Natalie Baerselman le Gros, Tessa Peters, Nicole Seisler, Ashley Thorpe, and others. Tickets cost £25.

Australian ceramic artists have two major award deadlines coming up. The North Queensland Ceramic Awards 2026, held at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in Townsville, invites entries for its biennial exhibition and offers a $10,000 acquisitive major prize, alongside several additional awards. Entries close July 7, 2026. In Victoria, the Clunes Ceramic Award 2026 is also open, with a $10,000 major prize. Finalists will be exhibited in Clunes from October 4 to November 1, 2026, with entries closing August 9, 2026.

Young artists worldwide are invited to apply for the 14th Shiwan Cup International Youth Ceramic Sculpture and Architectural Ceramic Art Competition, organized by the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) and the Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum. Open to applicants aged 18–45, this year’s competition responds to the theme Where Ends Begin. A total of 100 works will be shortlisted, with awards including a Grand Prize of ~$26,000 and additional prizes across several categories. Applications are free and open until August 31, 2026.

Our friends at The Kiln Rooms in London are hosting their Summer Ceramic Sale on June 5-7, bringing together over 80 local artists and designers across their Copeland Park and Bellenden Road studios. Visitors can discover handmade ceramics, meet the makers, and see where the work is created. All pieces will be for sale, directly supporting their practices, with 5% of sales donated to FiredUp4. The event is free and family- and dog-friendly.

Exhibitions

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

• Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun at The Pit, Los Angeles
• Claire Curneen: Between my finger and my thumb at Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin
• Shaping Clay: Women artists in contemporary Japanese ceramics at Dai Ichi Arts, New York
• Ken Price at Lisson Gallery, London
• Twenty Thousand Years at Galerie Fabian Lang, Zürich
• Sofia Beça: Where the Body Listens to Matter — Records of a Working Body at Espaço Mira, Porto
• Forms From The Subsoil at Sala de Arte CCU, Santiago, Chile

What’s on View

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

1. Roberto Lugo: American Crib: What’s Happening? at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia
2. Maddy Inez: Nascence at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles
3. Architect of the Bizen Renaissance: Mori Tōgaku at Joan B Mirviss, New York
4. Ming-Miao Ko: Devenir and Monika Debus: Beyond Salt and Earth at Centre Céramique Contemporaine La Borne, La Borne
5. Jeff Shapiro: Solo at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, Concord
6. Grayson Fair: Pressure Point at Kouri + Corrao Gallery, Santa Fe
7. Colleen Carlson and Sui Park: Between at Sculpture Space NYC, New York
8. Emily Orta: Whims of Panspermia at DIMIN, New York
9. Henry Goodman Exhibition for Emerging Artists at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Ontario
10. Susie Choi: Right side wrong side at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
11. GENSKÆR: Clara Toksvig, Thea Djurhuus, Sophia Moe at Peach Corner Gallery, Copenhagen
12. Laura Põld: Beautiful Pulsating Web at Kahan Art Space, Vienna
13. Trinidad Contreras: Solid Waves at Hannah Gallery, Barcelona

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Featured image – Laura Põld: Beautiful Pulsating Web at Kahan Art Space, Vienna

Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun is on view at The Pit, Los Angeles

May 9 – June 17, 2026

Yousif’s third exhibition with the gallery takes its title from the inscription on a curse tablet found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, where the phrase describes the mortal realm: the place of people who live above the earth, beneath the sun. Working from this ancient text as a point of departure, the exhibition brings together large-scale and intimate works that move between funerary artifact and living ornament, between what is carried out of a place and what endures. Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985, where she grew up surrounded by her mother’s paintings and handmade objects, emigrating to Canada at the age of 10.Yousif works primarily in clay, producing figurative sculptures that occupy a space between ancient devotional objects and contemporary folk art. Her signature “habibti” figures (Arabic for “sweetheart” or “my love”) are modeled on Sumerian votive statues, the small stone stand-ins placed inside temples by worshippers who could not enter themselves. Her lustrous, layered glazes fuse the exuberance of Bay Area Funk ceramics with the ancient visual traditions of her homeland. Running through the work is a persistent question: what it means to leave a place, potentially forever, and what do we carry with us when we do so?

The centerpiece of her new exhibition, “Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings” is a monumental ceramic head, approximately 23 inches tall and modeled after an 8th-century BCE ivory female figure excavated from the Burnt Palace at Nimrud, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like its ancient source, Yousif’s head is adorned with a richly worked diadem with her interpretation incor porating rosettes, pomegranates tendrils, and rib shaped earrings inspired by her grandmother’s that were brought back as a gift from her grandfather upon his return after being deported to Iran in the early 80s during the Iran Iraq war. The back of the head carries a boat scene from the marshes of Iraq, a landscape her mother has painted throughout her life and one that holds deep folkloric resonance in Iraqi visual culture. Flanking this central figure in the installation are a pair of tall palms, each about 33 inches high, their shafts decorated with a grid of red and black dots echoing ancient decorative patterning found on a 9th century oil lamp.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Habibti figures in yellow, green, and tangerine are each swathed in hand-formed ceramic rosettes, their faces composed and directly above the accumulated blooms. Various objects – a teal Dallah with a cascading drip glaze, a stone-like bird vessel paired with a small pomegranate bottle, small harps, Pazuzu figures, and pomegranates in various glazes – populate the room like an inven tory of talismans.

“Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun” is an exhibition about the objects that travel with us and the ones we leave behind. The royal tombs at Nimrud, discovered by Iraqi archaeologists in 1988, yielded extraordinary jewelry, resplendent vessels, and a clay tablet inscribed with a curse threatening those who would disturb the queens’ rest. For Yousif, this curse text resonates beyond its archaeological context, touching on the superstitions of her Iraqi childhood and, the protective power of the evil eye that recurs throughout her work, and the deeply human impulse to surround the dead with beautiful things. To recreate these funerary objects in clay, she writes, is “to forge a new sense of life.” Personal memory and deep history fold into one another throughout.. The exhibition extends Yousif’s singular territory in contemporary American ceramics – a practice where Bay Area Funk’s irreverence and material freedom meet the visual legacy of ancient Mesopotamia, held together by the lived experience of being in diaspora.

Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985 and lives in San Francisco, California. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and received a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2008. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include ICA San Francisco, CA (2024); Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA (2024); The Pit, Los Angeles / Palm Springs, CA (2023, 2021); David B. Smith, Denver, CO (2022); and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2021); amongst others. Yousif’s work has been featured in exhibitions such as Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA (2025); Rave into the Future at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2025); Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis (2024); GGLA, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY (2023); and Massey Klein Gallery, New York, NY (2023); amongst others. She was a finalist for the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize (2021), and completed an AICAD fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Ceramics Department (2019-2021). She received the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship Grant in 2023. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE, and the Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA. She’s represented by The Pit, Los Angeles, and Rebecca Camacho, San Francisco.

Contact
info@the-pit.la

The Pit
3015 Dolores St
Los Angeles CA 90065
United States

Photography by Chris Hanke. Courtesy of the Artist and The Pit.

Captions

• Habibti in Yellow Desert Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 18 x 12 x 12 in / 45.72 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm
• Habibti in Green Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 14 x 11 x 10 in / 35.56 x 27.94 x 25.40 cm
• Queen’s Rosettes from Tomb II Vessel in White Pebble, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 17 x 14.5 x 5 in / 43.18 x 36.83 x 12.70 cm
• Protection Vessel Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19.75 x 13.75 x 4.75 in / 50.17 x 34.92 x 12.06 cm
• Dallah in the Shape of Bird, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 13 x 11 x 5 in / 33.02 x 27.94 x 12.70 cm
• Stone Bird Vessel and Stout Pomegranate Bottle in Tangerine, 2026, Glazed ceramic, Bird: 11.5 x 12 x 3.5 in / 29.21 x 30.48 x 8.89 cm; Orange Pomegranate: 5 x 5 x 5 in / 12.70 x 12.70 x 12.70 cm
• Mom’s Wolves Ring, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 3.25 x 9 x 9 in / 8.25 x 22.86 x 22.86 cm
• Warp Palms, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 7 x 10 x 8 in / 17.78 x 25.40 x 20.32 cm
• Catalogue Scroll, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19 x 20 x 5 in / 48.26 x 50.80 x 12.70 cm
• Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 23 x 25.5 x 15 in / 58.42 x 64.77 x 38.10 cm

In the spring of 2020, my mother casually mentioned that my father had been involved in the Sir George Williams Affair. At the time, she was living in long-term care. It was COVID, and we were visiting on FaceTime. I had been reading some of my reflections on mine and my late father’s lived experience of race. My mother interrupted my monologue, “…of course there’s the time when your father was interviewed about his relationship with Perry over that race thing by Readers’ Digest …” My mother passed a few months later, but not before I was able to bring her my father’s photo albums and she identified a photograph of Perry Anderson with my father, emphasizing that they had been “thick as thieves” during their PhD studies in Biology at Western University in the early 1960s.

I hadn’t known about the Sir George Williams race protests of 1969. I knew about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior, Smokey Carmichael, the Black Panthers… But nothing of Canada and its reckoning with anti-Black racism.

I was born in May of 1968 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. My mother was white, born and raised on a farm in Ohio. My father’s biological mother is mythologized as being adopted from Ceylon by French missionaries, his father a descendant of Indo-indentured workers. I pass for Indian. My father’s genes dominated my DNA. He was a dark-skinned, Indo-Trinidadian, double diaspora’d into Canada at the age of 23. He came to study at McMaster University in Hamilton in 1953. By the time I was born, he was a tenure-track Biology professor at the University of New Brunswick. In 1969, my father was 39 years old. He and my mother had fled Sudbury from his first teaching post early in 1968, as my father’s lab had been burned to the ground, and bricks thrown through their windows – an attempt to run the threat of the “other” out of town. These are facts that were never mentioned to me when I was growing up – in fact never mentioned at all, until after my father had retired, and was able to unpack his memories with the expansiveness of time, so necessary to heal the depth of racially-motivated trauma.

In 2023, I was invited to create a solo exhibition for Le centre céramique Bonsecours, part of the ceramics CEGEP in old Montreal. After grappling for some time, I realized that the story I had to tell in Montreal, for Montreal, was this story of systemic racism within a Canadian academic institution in Montreal in the late 1960s; the story of young people of every colour standing up for Black equality in Canada; the story of allyship, of other West Indians of Indian descent taking a stand for their Black colleagues; my father’s story, that portrays him as an immigrant of colour supporting his white friend whose overt anti-Blackness sparked unprecedented violence; the story of decades of racial tension between West Indians of African descent and West Indians of South Asian descent that underpinned my father’s story.

I struggled to render my destabilization into art in the studio. I had first proposed loose figurative works in different clay bodies, ostensibly representing different races, but this quickly felt like too simplistic an allegory. As someone who generally works in abstraction, or with archival photography on ceramics, I found myself unable to translate these thoughts into physical expression. I tried different clay bodies at different temperatures, made test tiles, and assessed their qualities adjacent to each other: unglazed, raw, with or without slip, visceral. It was only after months that I realized that I cannot make art that reflects in any way, didactically or literally, in abstraction or figuratively, the individuals or groups of individuals that were players in the Sir George Williams Incident: I can only make art that tumbles out of the turmoil and complexity of my feelings – my feelings about my father, about the growing hurt and disappointment that he never told me about his involvement with the race protest, despite the fact that we were, as adults, atypically close friends as father and daughter.

My father had shared much of his past, his activism as a pacifist during the Vietnam War; his proactive pro-union engagement with the labour movement; his support of and counselling with closeted gay students; the violence that seeped into his core doled out at the hands of his schoolteachers and most viscously, his father. He had understood my deeply rooted passion for meaning-making through the colour of our skin. He had read my MFA thesis on the inter-subjectivity of mixed-race identity and the Caribbean identity. On the subject of Canada’s largest race protest, he had been silent.

I began to journal. This was not premeditated writing, it was an exercise designed to enable free-flow, where you simply write to write, to fill up three pages, no matter what, every day, and see what happens. I wrote about systems and structure, not about individuals. I wrote about how I ‘felt’ the pain of students pushed into corners. I let go of my struggle to represent the human body. And so, I began to understand that the churn I felt was larger than any few individuals, it felt larger than any one academic institution, it felt systemic, it felt structural: it felt intimately linked to the shame invoked by racism and the clash between a collective voice attempting to claim a place of contestation, faced with a collective establishment, attempting to quell these voices and maintain the status quo.

I decided to center my attention on the Henry F. Hall Building, the building that the students occupied for 12 days over five decades ago. The building itself, a physical witness to history that offered no answers; like my late father, it is forever silent. The building was built by the very system that the Black students attempted to expose and challenge. System as structure, is the nucleus of my installation. Power Structure is the pivotal piece in the exhibition. It begins with the ‘feelings’ of being pushed into corners. I physically pushed my fists and my knuckles into plaster corners, thirty-six times: nine levels in each of four corners show the oppression of being pushed against a wall, into a corner. The corners frame a hollow steel structure that evokes the Hall Building, while at the same time lays bare the hidden reinforced steel which form the skeletal frame of the brutalist concrete architecture designed by Ross, Fish, Duschenes and Barrett, one of the white, male, hetero led premiere national architectural firms of the day.

I have stacked the corners of the Power Structure on steel rods, and populated the grid-like space with suggestions, possibilities, and enigmatic visual triggers, fired onto a granite clay body, that when underfired, resembles concrete. The images on the tiles are distorted by the firing process, a metaphor for the distortion of truth surrounding the fire that was the disastrous culmination of the police raid and arrests on the sit in. The definitive truth of the incident has been so distorted through the media, through the passage of time, and through the necessarily transfigurative retelling of story. I rely on archive, and yet I also see the events through my own lens – that of a racialized artist, trying to find meaning in my country’s checkered past and my own mixed heritage.

I swept the actual salted stone and grit from the sidewalks along Mackay Street in the winter of 2024, and pressed it into the creases of the stacked corners. The clay crumbled from the salt after sitting for several weeks. Another metaphor. I mixed the clay with cement – clay and cement being familiarly acquainted through the silicone arts. I ‘slapped’ the clay onto the floor, strewn with pebbles and post-firing debris. I hung ceramic fragments with photographic glimpses of the past, headlines, news clippings, pixelated black and white photography – the charged racial politics of the time. I scattered ceramic computer cards on the ground and suspended them within Power Structure, reminiscent of the rainfall of computer punch cards, that fluttered from the ninth floor in silent protest onto the streets. Perhaps the most iconic image of the protest – the ‘rain’ of paper cards.

In the spring, as I was testing different clay bodies for punch cards, serendipity startled me with a life-altering intervention. I had had five pages of newspaper clippings from the several hundred I had reviewed from the Concordia Archives printed in black and white on decal paper to use as tests. I cut up sections of the pages and applied them to different unglazed vitrified ceramic surfaces. I was hoping to use paper-clay, its pinkness and relative weightlessness mimics the stiff thin card paper of the punch cards from the late 1960’s that I remember using in our family as grocery shopping lists for years after they became obsolete. One of the tests simply wouldn’t stick to the tile. I tried and tried. Exasperated, I pulled out the Elmer’s white glue, and as the decal refused to be placed, I noticed in small print, at the top of a column, the name ‘MacKenzie.’ Then on the previous column, at the bottom, ‘Joseph.’ Then I read the descriptor, ‘West Indian’ then the word ‘Trinidad’ , and I instantly knew I had been gifted the certitude of my mother’s claim that my father had been interviewed about Perry and the Sir George Williams. I traced the excerpt to an article published on February 22 in Times Magazine. Her memory had distorted the source, but there was my father’s character witness in black and white in an article entitled, “The Forgotten Man.”

The title seemed to define the exhibition, and it stuck. I created a digital collage featuring a photo of Perry and my father, the headlines from the day and the Times article as a backdrop. I pulled a cyanotype print on porcelain, backlit it, and set up the ephemera and art in the gallery. The rest of the installations came easily, fast and furiously. I found a blueprint of the 7th floor of the Hall Building in a 1976 published PhD paper, and used it to screenprint onto paper-clay, then crumpled the clay and pierced the objects with rebar. I wedged cyanotype blue pigments into concrete-like clay and did likewise. I ripped the street scenes of the protest into pieces and recomposed them digitally and output them as semi-transparent ‘smoke screens’ on mylar and hung them in the windows.

I designed six life-sized windows, each 3′ x 6′ comprised of three tableaux of archival digital collage: bold colours, disturbing photographs, newspaper pages of unsettling echoes from this near-forgotten past. Somehow, I begin to reckon with the past, its ghosts and its reverberations. Perhaps most importantly, I purposefully nudge my generation and the next generation off of our fulcrums, out of complacency, and into a portal of curiosity in order to seek our own truths, find our own meanings, assess our own values and beliefs with regard to what was, and what might be.

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic artist and arts journalist based in Toronto, Canada. She completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Working across ceramics, photography, digital media, and archive, her practice draws on her Indo-Trinidadian and Irish-American heritage to explore ancestry, race, migration, colonization, and healing.

L’homme oublié : tenir compte de l’affaire Sir George Williams, 1969 was on view between October and November 2025 at Centre de céramique Bonsecours, Montréal.

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Installation views by Olivier Lamarre.

Archival images courtesy of Library and Archives, Concordia University.

Ken Price is on view at Lisson Gallery, London

May 1 – July 25, 2026

In collaboration with Matthew Marks Gallery, Lisson is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the influential LA-based artist, Ken Price (Los Angeles, 1935-2012). Price was a relentlessly inventive artist who challenged forms through sculpture, painting and drawing throughout his five-decade career. As the first solo presentation of his work in the UK in nearly a decade, the exhibition brings together both sculpture and drawing, several of which are on view in London for the first time.

At Lisson Gallery, the exhibition showcases Price’s mastery of ceramics and expansion of the possibilities of the medium. As early as the 1960s and 70s, Price created diminutively scaled works whose innovative and outlandish shapes subverted the functionality of traditional ceramics. Works such as Prone (1997), Itself (2003), Yin (2009) and Amazon (2003) – formed from fired and painted clay – represent Price’s biomorphic, often erotic, sculptural creations. Speaking inherently to the viewer’s body, these fluid compositions play with form and balance, intimacy and seclusion. Through processes of layering and sanding pigment, Price achieves surfaces of depth and luminosity, transforming clay into objects that appear almost otherworldly.

Price was committed to utilising clay as a tool to explore his unique place and time in history. Deeply informed by the vernacular traditions of Mexican pottery and the improvisational rhythms of jazz and Pop culture, Price’s work is characterised by its vibrant palette, organic forms and tactile surfaces. His forms are also inspired by his experiences in Venice, California and New Mexico. Price witnessed the burgeoning contemporary art scene across Los Angeles, with the birth of a profusion of cultural institutions and artistic movements. He was a key figure in the LA artistic movements that originated in southern California in the 1960s, alongside other prominent artists. Following his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1960, at the age of just 25, Price’s work was profiled on the cover of Artforum (1963), and his first solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opened in 1969. In later years Price had significant exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Toward the end of his life, Price initiated a dramatic shift in scale and finish, working at a notably larger scale thus amplifying the physical and perceptual impact of his forms. His late sculptures are masterful arrays of colour where the material seems to dissolve, allowing iridescence and delicacy to exist in perfect harmony. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, the work combines sensuality with humour, their smooth surfaces lacquered with lustrous colours to augment their seductive power. Percival (2009) and Ceejay (2011), for example, engage the viewer more directly – their contours and polished bronze skins informing a sense of immediacy and presence.

The exhibition also illustrates Price’s extraordinary draftsmanship, in works on paper such as 100 Foot Sculpture in Isolation (2007), Nature Study (2007) and Two Hermits (2006), which maintain a sculptural vocabulary across one dimension. There is a seamless gradation between Price’s sculpture and drawing: both enveloped by the world he has created, an ethereal land that is both familiar and fantasy. Drawing was always a central component of Price’s work: “For me drawing is really flexible, and I use it in different ways. It’s my way of developing ideas”. Many of his 1960s works on paper explore ideas for developing abstract sculptures, while others envision impossible objects. Following his move to New Mexico in the early 2000s, wilder landscapes began to appear in his drawings, flowing with erupting volcanoes, cyclonic skies, and turbulent seas. Unstable Ground (2006) presents an atmosphere of heightened drama reflecting both the influence of the landscape and a deepening engagement with narrative.

About Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and promotes the work of more than 70 international artists across spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists and others of that generation, from Carmen Herrera and Olga de Amaral to Hélio Oiticica and Lee Ufan. In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Leiko Ikemura, Liu Xiaodong, Otobong Nkanga, Pedro Reyes, Sean Scully, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Wael Shawky. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists including Dana Awartani, Cory Arcangel, Garrett Bradley, Ryan Gander, Josh Kline, Hugh Hayden, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost and Cheyney Thompson.

Contact
contact@lissongallery.com

Lisson Gallery
27 Bell Street
London NW1 5BY
United Kingdom

Captions

• Installation views of ‘Ken Price’, 1 May – 25 July 2026 © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Crook, 2002, Fired and painted clay, 39 x 30 x 25 cm / 15 3/8 x 11 3/4 x 9 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Itself, 2003, Fired and painted clay, 15 x 20 x 14 cm / 5 7/8 x 7 7/8 x 5 1/2 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, NeGrum, 1994, Fired and painted clay, 35 x 38 x 31 cm / 13 3/4 x 15 x 12 1/4 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Bloop, 2009, Fired and painted clay, Part 1: 15 x 16 x 10 cm / 5 7/8 x 6 1/4 x 3 7/8 in; Part 2: 15 x 11 x 10 cm / 5 7/8 x 4 3/8 x 3 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Nicabar, 2007, Fired and painted clay, 13 x 15 x 22 cm / 5 1/8 x 5 7/8 x 8 5/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Over, 2010, Fired and painted clay, 33 x 29 x 46 cm / 13 x 11 3/8 x 18 1/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Sweet Cakes, 2002, Fired and painted clay, 19 x 19 x 23 cm / 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 9 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Untitled, 1996-2011, Fired and painted clay, 46 x 43 x 41 cm / 18 1/8 x 16 7/8 x 16 1/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Vernon, 2009, Fired and painted clay, 13 x 34 x 25 cm / 5 1/8 x 13 3/8 x 9 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Shaping Clay: Women artists in contemporary Japanese ceramics at Dai Ichi Arts, New York

May 21 – June 4, 2026

Dai Ichi Arts is pleased to present a summer group exhibition presenting contemporary women artists working in the ceramic medium, presenting new works by prominent and established artists alongside new rising voices in the landscape of Japanese ceramic art.

Since the 1950s, ceramic artists in Japan have gained increasing recognition, with many devoting themselves entirely to the medium through studio pottery practices, and the craft cultures of Shokunin (職人). For centuries, however, the field of ceramics in Japan remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, and women were largely excluded from key aspects of production. Often ingrained Shinto beliefs surrounding ritual impurity, alongside cultural systems of hereditary apprenticeship and succession, prohibited women from tasks such as kiln firing, limited their participation within traditional ceramic communities, with historically celebrated exceptions.

Meaningful change did not emerge until the post-war period from the 1960s. While women had historically been confined to decorative roles, the decades following the Second World War opened new possibilities for artistic and professional independence. Female ceramists began to challenge established conventions, moving beyond utilitarian and decorative traditions to pioneer sculptural, abstract, and avant-garde approaches to clay. Since then, and alongside the increasing admittance of co-ed university education in Japan during the postwar period, generations of women artists have transformed the landscape of contemporary Japanese ceramics, using clay as a powerful vehicle for artistic experimentation, personal expression, and critical inquiry.

Building upon this dialogue through the current presentations of Radical Clay—a traveling U.S. exhibition highlighting Japanese women artists working in ceramics from the celebrated Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz Collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics—this exhibition continues and expands that conversation. Alongside new works by artists associated with Radical Clay, the exhibition introduces established, emerging and innovative voices whose practices are reshaping the landscape of contemporary Japanese ceramics today.

Exhibiting artists: HIRUMA Kazuyo 昼馬 和代, KATO Mami 加藤 真美, KATSUMATA Chieko 勝間田 千恵子, KITAMURA Junko 北村 純子, KOIKE Shoko 小池 頌子, KOYAMA Atsuko 小山 厚子, MATSUDA Yuriko 松田 百合子, OISHI Sayaka 大石 早矢香, SHIGEMATSU Ayumi 重松 あゆみ, SHINGU Sayaka 新宮 さやか, TANAKA Yu 田中 悠, TASHIMA Etsuko 田嶋 悦子, TSUJI Kyo 辻 協, USAMI Shuri 宇佐美 朱理

Contact
info@daiichiarts.com

Dai Ichi Arts Ltd.
18 East 64th Street, Suite 1F
New York, NY 10065
United States

Photography by Yoriko Kuzumi

Captions

• Oishi Sayaka 大石 早矢香, ANIMA bowl (Lion), 2024, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 6 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 5 1/2 in. (16 × 20 × 14 cm)
• Tanaka Yu 田中 悠, Tsutsumimono, 2018, stoneware with matte glaze, 13 3/4 × 16 1/4 × 16 1/4 in. (34.9 × 41.3 × 41.3 cm)
• Usami Shuri 宇佐美 朱理, Sculpture, TOWA 2, 2026, accompanied with a signed wood plate, stoneware, 16 1/8 × 13 in. (41 × 33 cm)
• Shigematsu Ayumi 重松 あゆみ, Sculpture, Jomon spiral, 2015, stoneware, 14.5 × 12.5 × 13.9 in. (37 × 32 × 35.5 cm)
• Tashima Etsuko 田嶋 悦子, Cornucopia 09-Y12, 2009, stoneware and glass, 8 3/5 × 16 1/2 × 14 1/10 in. (22 × 42 × 36 cm)
• Katsumata Chieko 勝間田 千恵子, (Untitled) biomorphic sculpture, 2011, accompanied with a signed wooden box, glazed stoneware encrusted with chamotte (crushed fired porcelain), 9 1/2 in. (24 cm)
• Shingu Sayaka 新宮 さやか, “Calyx” bowl, with signed wood box, mixed clay with glaze slip, 4 1/8 × 5 3/8 in. (10.4 × 13.7 cm)
• Koike Shoko 小池 頌子, Shell-shaped lidded vessel with white glaze, 1992, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 11 1/8 × 10 1/8 in. (28.2 × 25.6 cm)
• Kitamura Junko 北村 純子, Flower jar, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 7 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (19.1 × 16.5 cm)

Claire Curneen: Between my finger and my thumb is on view at Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin

March 28 – June 28, 2026

‘Between my finger and my thumb’: the first line of Seamus Heaney’s poem Digging perhaps evokes the sensuous squeezing of clay in the artist’s hands, but, as Claire points out, this is a nod to creative labour more broadly, the idea taking form through physical effort. Claire pinches clay as Heaney digs with his ‘squat pen’, poetic labour connecting hand and head.

For Claire, physical technique and the act of making are crucial. Her training as a potter – learning glaze technology and how materials behave, a kind of education that is dying – makes her work as a sculptor unique. Hand-building creates a physical relationship with an object as you move around it. ‘The way I make something is so important because I make it like I make a pot … I can’t make it any other way.’

For this reason, age-old ceramic metaphors resonate strongly for Claire: the clay vessel as a body (with its neck, lip, belly, foot) and the body as a vessel. What her figures contain – doubt, resilience, anguish, ecstasy – is as important as what we see.

Slightly paradoxically, then, Ancient Plaything is ‘the only pot I’ve ever made.’ Its title comes from the Guwan Tu (‘Pictures of Ancient Playthings’), a series of scroll paintings commissioned in 1729 by China’s Yongzheng emperor to depict a personal arrangement of artworks. This tall porcelain pot, with elongated gourd-like neck, flowers and stems modelled in relief and painted in blue and lustre, and two birds on the rim facing each other, expresses Claire’s feeling that her figures are ‘like Chinese blue and white pots.’ ‘Like’: with no base and its body modelled as a head, it is not literally a pot.

Claire wants her work to be seen as ‘a spectacle of making’. The interiority of her figures is expressed through ceramic technique: the textures of hand-building, painted and printed motifs, gold lustre like precious blood, glazes clear like tears or opaque with tin oxide. It is important to understand how a piece is made. To fit Claire’s kiln, Piercing the Heart has been made in two parts – like a magician’s assistant sawn in half, we joked: ‘how did they do that?’ ‘Craft is a belief system,’ says Claire, ‘we trust in it and there is a magic in it.’

Piercing the Heart alludes to Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St Teresa and, with a spouting branch, to the myth of Daphne. This reclining female figure is blanketed in richly modelled flowers: ‘a blooming eruption that consumes, only for it to be short-lived. But in ceramics you can keep it.’ Tin glaze disguises the red terracotta beneath; it softens the painted blue pigment and recedes at edges to define flowers and fingers, slanted rocks and soulful eyes.

Claire loves how tin-glazed terracotta differs from the porcelain she is best known for, its unpredictable effects, its more demotic connotations. Siren, a bird with a woman’s face, sings alluringly on a rocky base: the thinning tin glaze beautifully describes the texture of her feathers. So too the taut claws of the bird figure Angel.

Systems of belief are ‘beautiful things’, says Claire, though she recognises that religions can do terrible things. In her hands, ancient myth and biblical stories still today excavate the most important questions posed by our existence – our vulnerability, our suffering, our inner life, the challenge of connecting with others. Claire’s work may strike us as lonely or sad, but ‘we are all alone at the end’, she says, and insists it is not sad. Rather, it is reflective, contemplative, brave. She is refreshingly honest about happiness, admitting to not always being happy and not understanding why many think the pursuit of happiness is essential.

The introspective character of Claire’s figures makes Welcome Stranger a surprise. It is ‘quite blingy – not what I do’, she says. Named after the huge gold nugget discovered in Australia in 1869, this standing terracotta figure is covered in gold lustre from head to toe. In the Empty Tomb figures, we see how Claire uses gold lustre to suggest a figure’s internal life, bleeding to the surface or remaining within. In Welcome Stranger, this interiority has become the whole of the figure’s exterior in what seems a courageous gesture of openness, vulnerability, generosity, offering welcome or hoping for it. Claire cares about strangers. She has spoken about observing the quiet suffering of others and quoting it in her work.

Claire identifies with Nature Morte, a tin-glazed terracotta female head covered with modelled flowers, a ‘self-portrait of sorts’, but not literally. She welcomes the idea of people engaging with her own interiority but is not prescriptive about the ideas that her work embodies.

The invitation to exhibit in The Drawing Schools at Eton College from Master of Art and ceramics specialist Connor Coulston (and then in the main gallery at Ruthin Craft Centre) excites Claire with the opportunity in a large gallery to show works not as ceramics traditionally shelved and showcased en masse, as if given security in numbers, but away from the walls, isolated in space, each individual sculpture considered on its own terms. Not before time, given how the ‘fine art’ world has now embraced the ‘craft world’ and how curators have developed the confidence to show ceramics in this way. Her ideas call to mind the formal spatial arrangement of objects in the Guwan Tu.

Painted Tree, made in tin-glazed terracotta in two parts, is painted with raindrops. Placed on a low stand in the small courtyard outside Claire’s studio, it glints beautifully in sunshine and light rain. She plans to make a ‘grove’ of about five such trees. The idea relates to the theme of Daphne and of transformation, exploring the anthropomorphic qualities of trees and the association between branches and human hands. When trees shake, Claire says, they are like hands drawing attention. An experimental terracotta branch is alive with hands among its shoots, some splayed and reaching, others held together, more reticent. Another terracotta branch is modelled with hands at it tips, gold threads cascading from its ‘elbow’.

Claire talks of this work constituting ‘a memory of making’, returning to the earlier idea of a terracotta tree made in about 1999. Claire warns me not to over-intellectualise this. ‘The more I talk about my work, the more I undo it.’ She feels that she is now working more instinctively, working with a stock of ideas and experience – ‘the memory of making’ – that come to her increasingly naturally. She doesn’t like the art world’s ‘echo chamber’, grounding her practice in her family that pursues other interests, in social life, food and walking, in her students at Cardiff School of Art & Design who share personal things in extraordinary ways.

For her students, Claire is something of a counsellor, ‘making a difficult situation manageable’ by seeing art as ‘not just about me, but something bigger.’ Underpinning it all is her sense of good fortune in being able to do what she does and in what her work enables her to do – ask questions, indulge curiosity, explore emotions, make connections.

Text by Andrew Renton, commissioned by Ruthin Craft Centre. Andrew Renton is an applied art curator with a particular interest in ceramics. He worked at National Museums Liverpool (1993–1999) and at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (1999–2024) in the roles of Head of Applied Art, Keeper of Art and Head of Design Collections. At Amgueddfa Cymru he developed the collection of historic applied art and modern and contemporary craft and curated a series of exhibitions on craft and design. He has published research on historic Welsh ceramics and a wide range of other topics. Andrew is a Trustee of the Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham; Nantgarw China Works Museum; and the Contemporary Art Society for Wales.

Contact
ruthincraftcentre@dll.co.uk

Ruthin Craft Centre
Park Road, Ruthin
Denbighshire, LL15 1BB
United Kingdom

Photos by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd

I have come to Andalucia to visit a stunningly visual exhibition, that combines ceramic works by two of Spain’s most eminent modern and contemporary artists — Pablo Picasso and Miquel Barceló — together with a selection of pottery from the archaeological collections of the Museo de Almería and the Museo de Cádiz. It opened in Almería, a Mediterranean city, in December last year and has now moved west, to Cádiz, a historical gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. Those lucky enough to visit this exhibition encounter an assemblage of clay-based pieces in which forces of continuity between past and present are mutually enveloped. Its co-curator, Miquel López-Ramiro, Artistic Director of the Museo Picasso in Málaga, has described to me how the exhibition “approaches ceramics not as an object but as a medium that traverses time. From Neolithic pieces to Picasso and Barceló, clay emerges as a material that preserves memory, gesture, and transformation.” Indeed, unlayering past into present, and memory into a rounded contingency with that which remains unfinished, this is an edgy, raw exhibition that communicates how clay, and its working, lies at the centre of human existence.

As a project it extends an idea first introduced by López-Ramiro and his colleagues at Museo Picasso in 2024, when works by Picasso were paired with those of Jeff Koons (link), in the context of the Alhambra Palace in Grenada. In this latest instantiation or ‘dialogic pairing’, the process of ‘reflection’ is brought to life in a multiplicity of ways, including adaptations in the display of the material in the venues, with López-Ramiro co-curating the exhibition together with Tania Fábrega, director, Museo de Almería; and Laura Esparragosa, director, Museo de Cádiz. As López-Ramiro has stated, the movement between venues facilitated:

a change in the interpretation of the project: from the stratigraphic depths of the Mediterranean to the openness of the Atlantic as a space of circulation and encounter. In Almería, the Mediterranean appears as a space of cultural sedimentation, of continuity In Cádiz, the Atlantic introduces notions of openness, displacement, and crossing. Two geographies, two ways of relating to material, that allow us to understand ceramics not only as origin, but also as transit.

In this way, the exhibition is configured as a system of reflections, not in the sense of reproduction but as a movement of repetition and difference, where past, present and possible futures come together on a single surface. In Almeria the relationship with a depth of time was fundamental, but in Cádiz, the interpretive axis shifts. It moves not so much toward origins as toward transit. Ceramics cease to function merely as vestiges and become objects in motion. The exhibition does not change in its conceptual core, but its breathing does.

Meanwhile, both museums have each contributed ten works shown in each venue, respectively, contributing to the sense of difference with repetition to which López-Ramiro is referring. In Almería, deft use of light and shadow amplified a sense of epiphaneous interplay between the exhibition’s different elements, that appeared to rise up in front of the exhibition viewer like a dramatis personae. The presentation in Cádiz invites us primarily to look down, as if giving us a historical overview of the interconnections between ceramics from very different periods; Ramiro speaks of the lower, large table, there as being like a shoreline, on which various objects have been stranded.

Of over a hundred objects on display, fifty-eight are by Barceló and thirty-eight are by Picasso. Several of the latter are rarely-seen items from the personal collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, whose Foundation (link) has been a key supporter of the ‘Reflections’ series. He tells us at the preview of the residual force of influence on his grandfather throughout his life of his exposure in boyhood to a Mediterranean cultural iconography. Picasso lived from his birth in Málaga in 1881 until the age of ten.

The thirty seven works by Picasso in the exhibition were made at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris in the south of France the 1950s and 1960s. He created thousands of works there from the mid-1940s onwards, glazing and painting both on standardised forms on fragments of pottery discarded in the workshop. This sense of playful discovery and a levelling out beyond high art to something more collectivist, finds its way also into how the exhibition display in both Almería and Cadiz museums is organised.

Linking things together, moreover, is a sense of liveness infusing Barceló’s practice. His works here, as the co-curators observe, “bear the marks of the physical process, becoming living surfaces that retain the energy of the moment”.

Born in Mallorca, in 1957, Barceló is an artist whose works generally have a heightened contemporaneity, combined with an elemental earthiness, evident in works in various media, from performance to painting, from sculptural installations to a style of ceramics that conveys a sense of disrupted interference with notions of finitude or completion. This is here brought into exciting juxtaposition both with lesser-known aspects of Picasso’s postwar ceramics and with astonishing examples of works from the Phoenician, Bronze, Iron, Roman and Middle Ages, all held together with a curatorial vision that celebrates –- in anti-hierarchical fashion — the powerful intimacies of relation that the practice of pottery has carried over generations.

López-Ramiro has commented also on why it seemed appropriate to bring these two artists together, speaking of their meeting point in the finding “in ceramics a space of freedom. For Picasso, it is a domain where painting, sculpture, and object come together. For Barceló, it is a physical, almost corporeal territory, where gesture becomes inscribed in the material itself. What they share is a direct relationship with matter—clay as language—and a capacity to transform the everyday into the symbolic.”

On the eve of the exhibition opening at the Museo de Almería, I sit down with Barceló, who first gained international attention when included in the Biennal in São Paulo in 1981, as well as in documenta 7 in Kassel in the following year. Whilst this drew him out of the shadows, he recalls in our interview, “I was a young artist and my work for many years had been ignored”. He draws a parallel with ceramics, that for a long time were viewed “as not fancy at all” but have recently come into fashion. At the same time, as Barceló tells me, ceramics “have always been there”.

From the 1980s into the 1990s, Barceló became known for his cultural nomadism, moving to live in various different places, whilst retaining homes in Mallorca and Paris, absorbing different landscapes and diverse cultural influences. He was at the same time morphing these together with his own engrained sense of relation to elemental dimensions of his Mallorcan childhood as well as a sense of relation to the longer history of Spanish figurative painting.

Melding all of this together into an original metier, Barceló’s practice is characterised by a sense of provisionality and openness and with tactility of texture. These too are qualities that find various forms in what is on show in both venues, where human images reduced to the bare essentials of mask-like forms are aligned with 3D constructs that lack specific functional uses, being distorted with respect to lines and angles.

The first word that Barceló uses when we commence our interview is ‘fragments”. He notes too that for him, “ceramics is transversal”. He then tells me hat during the process of the installation of the exhibition at the Museo de Almería, they had extemporised the creation of a Nativity scene from gathering together pieces found within the museum’s basement storehouse of archaeological artefacts and linking this to a series of fragments and small works of his own (many of which he had fired in the previous week), whilst adding also into this scenography some small pieces by Picasso. What came out of this was an assemblage speaking directly to an important moment in the Andalucian cultural and liturgical calendar. Barceló refers to the ‘crib’ installation with its emphasis on birth, as setting the thematic scene for the exhibition more broadly.

He points too to the congruence in style and symbol of three bulls that appear in the installation, one is from the 5th century, another was made by Picasso in 1957, and a third, was made by Barceló in 2009. He observes “each look like a variation of the same thing, but there are five thousand years of difference between them”. He describes the “same process”, of “hand, fingers and clay” at work in all three and speculates on what might happen if “a volcano” suddenly occurred and then someone in five thousand years’ time found these pieces all together. Might they then seem to have made by the same artist? And what of ideas of modernity then? The clay fragments might survive but what of notions of singular artistic identity?

Barceló’s initiation into working with clay is critical to this sensibility. He was first introduced when living in Mali in West Africa in the early 1990s: “I began to do ceramics for the first time there. It was fascinating. In the beginning it was for me something new, the clay, because I was a painter. But I couldn’t work outdoors because of the wind which was there every day during the Harmattan season”.

Instead, he was invited by female members of the local Dogon community to learn the low-fired, unglazed, hand-coiled methods they use in the production of earthenware pottery, carrying on traditional techniques honed over centuries. He tells me how:

Three generations of women showed me the processes, the grandmother, the mother and the daughters. They showed me first how to choose the clay from the right place, which was very far away; it was not easy to walk to the right place, and there were three different types, including yellow and white. And they showed me how to prepare the clay, it was a long process and then how to ‘cook’ it. Even now, I remember all the names in Dogon. I was shown also how to polish until it is glossy. It was fascinating. For me in the beginning it was something new….I was a painter, but I realised that the clay was the key to something.

When I eventually came back to Europe, I was in my village in Mallorca, it was still the beginning of the 1990s. I realised that there was an old man still working in a pottery studio there, in the same way as they had in the old days, in the 1950s. It was the last of that generation and so I worked with him for a year. After the Dogon, it was actually like modernity, we were working with electricity, we had an electric oven.

I observe that I find it fascinating that the wind was in a sense the force behind this shift in his own direction, as his paintings from before the 1990s appear to me convey a sense of the wind blowing through them:

Yes I think it is the same mood, impulse, probably. I have felt like I wanted to work directly with the earth and to give this volume. Something metaphysical. I was invited around the turn of the century to develop a major work for the Cathedral in Palma (link), and I realized that, for me, it is always about a desire to work both from the inside and the outside together. I began to imagine big walls in clay that I could then work behind, which is something I could not do with painting. I discovered a young ceramicist in Italy who could do this work with me (link). It was very exciting. It allowed me to work at a larger scale, where I am still doing the same thing, but projects are bigger whilst the technicity is getting better because the projects are larger. At the moment I am I am discussing taking on a commission to do something related, which would be a gigantic ceramic. I think probably it would be ten years work at least.

Meanwhile, all the recent works being shown by Barceló in the exhibitions are ‘sem titulo’, a factor that he attributes, when I ask him, to their having been recently made: “Yes, all my new works are untitled, because they just new, it is too much work to also put titles. I just add titles when the work goes to the gallery, or to the market”.

I then ask Barceló about something I heard him say in an interview with a German magazine in 2024, to the effect that in terms of his process, he takes the view that ‘knowledge’ can only come afterwards. I wanted to know more:

Yes, of course, well I always have the feeling that I have to find the technique for the precise thing that I might be about to take on. The more you know the more you can do things. It is a kind of invention. It is a thing I have never done before. I remember during the 1980s Documenta everything seemed very very new but now people are turning back to the pre-historic, to me there seems to be a big excitement around the big caves.

So do you think that the old is now the new new?

I have this feeling very much. For me the biggest excitement in art is connected to this sense in which we are becoming more aware of what has gone before. I am increasingly astonished by this. I think I didn’t see this earlier, or I was not able to absorb. Now I can see. It is like a humility, right? We always believe we are the first until we realise we are part of something else. Even our own histories.

Might it be something to do with a feeling like we are living in an Artificial Age and we are all possibly feeling the need for stone again?

Probably yes, and ceramics, the clay, it is in the Bible, humans were made with clay. I think nothing is more human than the clay. When I was in China, or Japan, or Africa, it was there, the clay is everywhere. I went to spend time in the Himalayas, ten or fifteen years ago, as it was becoming difficult politically to go to Mali, and I wanted to try to something with the intensity of the Dogon, and I was in the monastery and I was asking questions of the monk. He told me it was or is the same thing to paint or to pray, the root of the word is the same, so too to make a poem, it has the same spirit. I understand that.

I also realise that everything I am doing now I tried before, when I was ten or twelve years old, when I was just a little boy. I think this exhibition is very much about Andalucia, it is very Iberic, very local in a way. We are also very local. Picasso was very universal but I think the roots of what he was doing are very much in Andalucia. I think you can find them all around. I think it is cultural identity. It is not the purpose of the exhibition, but I have realized, talking to you, that this is, in the end, what the exhibition is telling us.

Bronaċ Ferran is an art writer, curator, and Research Associate at NCACE, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Reflections. Picasso × Barceló forms part of the series of exhibitions by Museo Picasso Málaga, in collaboration with Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA) and the Andalusian Regional Government. After its presentation at the Museo de Almería between December 2025 and March 2026, the exhibition is on view at Museo de Cádiz through June 28, 2026.

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A previous version of this article incorrectly mentioned that Cádiz was the capital of Andalucia.

Twenty Thousand Years is on view at Galerie Fabian Lang, Zürich

March 5 – June 27, 2026

Featuring: Caroline Achaintre, Carl Anderson, Perrine Boudy, Gabi Deutsch, Sarah Dwyer, Clare Goodwin, Hippolyte Hentgen, Yulia Iosilzon, Guillaume Martin-Taton, Grayson Perry, Becky Tucker, Betty Woodman, Rita Zurbrügg

Oh, dear ceramics. You ware of the earth. You have something primal about you; you ground us. You feel like a deep breath of fresh Alpine air or like looking up from below into the crown of a thick tree trunk.

This is not an exhibition of historical antiquities, but perhaps a declaration of love. An exhibition about what today’s generation of artists can do with ceramics. Works that are equally virtuosic in terms of craftsmanship as they are in terms of artistry. Because that is precisely the crucial relationship. Nothing here is classical anymore, and yet the view on tradition plays a role for all artists here. We celebrate both how far the medium has come and how far one can go with it.

Everything made of ceramic is fragile, and yet it is the most long-lasting earth material that can be shaped by hand. Just think of the millennia-old ceramic treasures that we can still admire today in almost intact condition. It is one of the oldest means of artistic expression. Hundreds, thousands of years ago, our Palaeolithic ancestors must have noticed the material properties of clay. They must have seen the footprints of their prey – and their own heavy footsteps – pressed into the riverbanks, retaining their shape even when water collected in them. But there was still a long way to go before clay could be processed into ceramics.¹

Ceramics is a much broader concept than many might assume. It has long since emancipated itself from the ‘ceramics is just design’ pit. Interestingly, the first ceramic objects were not practical bowls, but works of art. Around 28,000 years ago, the Pavlovian culture of Gravettian Europe – a highly developed society of mammoth hunters – began using special clay kilns to fire small animal and human figures. Their most legendary work remains the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a curvaceous figure considered to be the oldest known ceramic in the world.

Still until today, it is considered one of the most direct means of expression. Nearly all of the artists here in the exhibition spoke of the immediacy to the material in translating what they want to create. In today’s world, ceramics might even act therapeutic and keep us sane in the digital terror jungle. Philosophically, you can treat ceramics as this thing that turned against modernism.² Today, perhaps even as the thing that turns against digitalisation. Because, and this is also intrinsic to ceramics, you have to experience it. Images of the works shown here can never do justice to their surface texture, the reflections of light, their multi-sidedness and multi dimensionality.

If you leave aside the function of ceramics, what do you hold on to? From the exhibition catalogue of Hans Coper’s exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1969, he says: ‘Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function, one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch.’ This is probably an apt description for what we find here in terms of virtuosity and ‘pitches’.

Perhaps the most radical artist working with ceramics, and an inspiration to many of the artists featured here, is the late Betty Woodman (1930–2018, USA). Betty’s ceramic practice shifted from the functional to the increasingly conceptual, drawing on the generous sculpturalism of Italian pottery for her Etruscan Vases works (1965-66) and – also on show – for her Pillow Pitchers (1970s-2000s), imbued too with the tradition of Chinese ceramic pillows, gloriously unwieldy in Betty’s reinterpretation. It was a time of ‘broadening my understanding of what clay could be’, said Betty, an early foretelling of her radical ceramic and painting assemblages, such as Summer View, (2014), which is on view in the exhibition: a protruding trompe l’oeil tabletop inhabited by spliced clay vessels.³

The artist Perrine Boudy (born in Versailles in 1995) is, by her own admission, a great admirer of Woodman. Her creations are also sculptures and should not really be understood as vases. They are inspired by Greco-Roman krater vases, but are unglazed and porous, and therefore unusable. She prefers not to be surprised by the colours of the glaze after firing and instead plays with engobes, which she uses ‘like aquarelle paints or ink’ before firing the piece in a single pass. The vase thus becomes three-dimensional paper. Drawing transformed into volume, striving to play with the boundary between drawing and ceramics. Boudy uses the vehicle of vases, which are charged with meaning and are ingrained in all our memories as irrefutable cultural heritage, and, in the spirit of a simulacrum, transforms them into a platform on which one can play around at will. Omage and transfigured comic drawing at the same time. She makes use of obsessively recurring motifs such as dots, volutes and stripes, purely ornamental, or comic book-like animals such as horses or dogs.

Caroline Achaintre (born 1969 in Toulouse, France / lives and works in London, UK) also toys with two- and three-dimensionality. She creates various characters, half fantastical, half ghostly, sometimes made of wool, sometimes of ceramic, in different dimensions. Solaroid appears like a carnival mask dazzled by the sun. In general, the European carnival, with its shape-shifting, plays an important role as a source of inspiration for Achaintre. The sun forces a squinting of the eye area and shrinks the ceramic sheet into a three-dimensional mask. Something that was originally two-dimensional becomes something animated and three-dimensional. Achaintres’ thought experiment perhaps goes even a step further, one might think: don’t you suddenly see things you didn’t see before when you yourselves squint your eyes and focus on a blurred spot?

For Sarah Dwyer (born 1974 in Ireland. Lives and works in London, UK), everything begins with drawing, but first on paper. Starting with life drawings, she reworks her life figures on canvas again and again, reducing them, stretching them lengthwise or widthwise, or squashing them together, until they have the right shape. For this, she uses her own abstract vocabulary of mark-making, which she has developed over a period of fifteen years, with a wink to the history of abstract figuration. Recently, she has been transferring the discourse she developed in painting to experimental ceramic sculptures. Between figuration and abstraction, her exploration of the nature of the gestural sign, the line, continues. The sculptures are like physical three-dimensional manifestations of brushstrokes. What is astonishing is how spontaneous and free they appear, completely concealing the fact that they have been so carefully layered and fired so many times to achieve the different surface textures, until just before the heat in the kiln would break them.

Like Dwyer, Gabi Deutsch (born 1973. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) explores forms of abstraction and translations into three-dimensional sculpture in her work. She probes the potential of the material, its structure and its possibilities for transformation, making the nature of the process visible. Forms from the history of architecture, art and design serve as references for her work. Deutsch has been working mainly with ceramics for several years. She creates hand-formed unique pieces that are situated between works of art and functional design objects.

As the only self-confessed designer in the group, Rita Zurbrügg comes very close to the boundary between the supposedly different worlds of art and design. As impressively artistic as they are, there should no longer be any distinction between the two. Also inspired by architecture, visual arts and the diversity of forms found in nature, Zurbrügg transforms clay into masterful sculptural objects for everyday use.

Since 2018, Guillaume Martin-Taton (born 1991 in Nîmes, FR. Lives and works in Geneva, CH) has been developing a ceramic practice in which chimera-like animals play a central role. These hybrid figures, which emerged from his research into signage systems and the Manitou alphabet, function as three-dimensional signs – simultaneously sculptural forms and coded presences. Drawing on aposematism and the visual warning strategies of the animal kingdom, he composes surfaces characterised by strong contrasts, rhythmic patterns and symbolic motifs. These creatures, which lie somewhere between artefact and totem, embody a language in which colour, ornament and volume serve as signals. Through them, ceramics become a space in which the sign detaches itself from the wall, takes on volume and transforms into a living, ambiguous figure – archaic and contemporary at the same time.

Becky Tucker‘s (born 1993 in Scarborough, UK. Lives and works in Glasgow, UK) shape- and genre-transcending sculptures and reliefs explore the intersection between ceramic tradition, cultural symbolism and the emotional intensity of contemporary cultural Angst. Her latest work, Hyetal, addresses the revered awe towards water and floods, an overwhelming, unstoppable force. It builds on the long tradition of rain/water deities and folkloric spirits. From the Greek Hyades – nymphs who bring rain – to Oya, the goddess of violent rainstorms in Yoruba mythology, to the Kelpies – malevolent water spirits in Scottish folklore. The figure stretches upwards towards the rain and downwards towards the earth – in searching. The barely human figure is ambiguous in terms of gender and age; it is unclear what is costume and what is skin. She sits there, seemingly oblivious, except for her six eternally open eyes.

As already mentioned, ceramics have been attributed with a kind of healing effect. This may be due to the immediately fulfilling haptic qualities of clay and the variety of possibilities it offers. Carl Anderson (born 1990 in Shoreham-by-Sea, UK. Lives and works in West Sussex, UK) regards ceramics as a form of trauma therapy. A rather serious trauma that he has to cope with. Anderson was the victim of a knife attack that nearly cost him his life. His series ‘Spoon Warmer’ shows various grinning trolls whose protruding ‘head world’ forms a mysterious arm that hides an object or a hand signal behind their backs. Their grin is intended to distract from the secret code, but at the same time arouses suspicion about their true intentions. The title and the comic-like, playful appearance of the now obsolete spoon warmer play with the feeling of feel-good domesticity, while the sculpture tells of hidden threat and deception. A tense dialogue emerges between harm and care, digital and physical, violence and safeguarding, absurdity and seriousness. Anderson questions what can still be trusted in today’s world.

Clare Goodwin‘s (born 1973 in Birmingham, UK. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) ceramic works are an extension of her painting practice. With them, she challenges her own paintings on canvas, which are rooted in hard-edge abstraction. Glaze becomes colour field and line, blurring the hard structures of her paintings and introducing a softer, tactile, architectural presence between object, surface and image. Sometimes she also breaks up the forms and reassembles them like a mosaic. In doing so, Goodwin introduces a pattern-based colour scheme that reflects personal and found objects with abstract representations of domestic interiors. A quiet beauty emerges, a kind of ‘constructive nostalgia’ that allows geometric fragments and muted colour relationships to integrate between painting, tile and object.

Yulia Iosilzon‘s (born 1992 in Moscow, RU. Lives and works in London, UK) work also straddles the boundary between painting, ceramics and world-building, and likewise consists of mosaic fragments. Less tied to abstraction than Goodwin, and more to figurativeness, Iosilzon merges narrative and ornament into a single pictorial logic. They transport the viewer into landscapes that appear both mythical and interior. Iosilzon deepens her exploration of translucency and fluidity—qualities that extend beyond the material surface into the architecture of her compositions. These new ceramic paintings open a dialogue between the personal and the cosmic, between the remembered structures of mythology and the instability of contemporary experience. The visual language unfolds through a series of scenes in which human and natural forms are intertwined, creating moments of transformation. Through this ongoing tension between disintegration and creation, Iosilzon transforms inherited symbolic narratives into psychological dramas full of ambiguities. The mythical no longer dictates moral consequences, but provides a framework for exploring porous identities, shifting emotional states, and the generative instability between form and feeling.

The Tribu series by artist duo Hippolyte Hentgen (Gaëlle Hippolyte born 1977 in Perpignan, FR. Lina Hentgen born 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand, FR. Live and work in Paris, FR) ties in with the tradition of the objet trouvé and is perhaps the third strand in the field of mosaic creations. Originally conceived at the invitation of the Cristallerie Saint Louis Museum (Hermès Foundation) in Saint Louis les Bitches, France, the duo worked with remnants from the Cristallerie that revealed imperfections in the crystal. Each sculpture was an assemblage of crystal elements, objects found at flea markets and cut-out images. In the case of Tribu here, all the elements consist of ceramic objects found at flea markets. These sculptures function like rebuses. As in collages, analogies or connections between new ideas arise through the association of the visible and hidden original history of the objects used.

The sculpture is combined with one of the artists’ latest drawings from the ‘Patterns’ series. The Patterns are based on fragments or close-ups of elements from Italian Renaissance paintings, combined with abstract motifs resembling fabric patterns, just like Goodman’s work. A postmodern pop effect is achieved by using art history to address and change the discussion about representation.

British artist Grayson Perry (born 1960 in Chelmsford, UK. Lives and works in London, UK), winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, creates, among others, enchantingly beautiful pots, hand-sewn quilts and extravagant clothing designs that convey provocative themes. At the heart of his work is a passionate desire to comment on profound injustices in society. Perry uses pots as a narrative and figurative medium, as a round, curved surface for bizarre or bitter stories. In the richly textured work Untitled (1992), the sentence “Are not murder, pollution, perversion and all forms of evil natural as well? appears alongside photo transfers of an innocent horse, cute dogs, hands praying to God and an engraving of a king and his mistress, both naked. The king has grown breasts, he has a pregnant belly and has to stand on platform shoes to be at least as tall as his much younger lover with her iron corset. Need we say more?

Contact
info@fabianlang.ch

Galerie Fabian Lang
Obere Zäune 12
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

Captions

• Installation views of twenty thousand years, 2026, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, CH. Copyright/credits: © The artists and Galerie Fabian Lang. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Becky Tucker, Hyetal, 2026, Glazed stoneware and fabric, 180 x 57 x 40 cm, 70.87 x 22.44 x 15.75 in. Copyright/credits: © Becky Tucker. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Betty Woodman, Summer View, 2013, Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, acrylic paint, canvas and wood, 152.4 x 109.22 x 29.21 cm, 60 x 43 x 11.5 in. Copyright/credits: © Woodman Family Foundation. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and the Woodman Family Foundation. Photo: Annik Wetter.
• Caroline Achaintre, Solaroid, 2019, Ceramic, 35 x 25 x 7 cm, 13.78 x 9.84 x 2.76 in. Copyright/credits: © Caroline Achaintre. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha.
• Carl Anderson, Unzipped, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 39.5 x 16 x 23.5 cm, 15.55 x 6.3 x 9.25 in. Copyright/credits: © Carl Anderson. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Gabi Deutsch, Lamp (Your Power), 2024, Glazed ceramic, ink on polystyrene, 100 x 36 x 36 cm, 39.37 x 14.17 x 14.17 in. Copyright/credits: © Gabi Deutsch. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Grayson Perry, Untitled, c. 1992, Glazed ceramic, 46 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm, 18.11 x 8.46 x 8.46 in. Copyright/credits: © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo: Jack Hems.
• Hippolyte Hentgen, Series “Tribu”, 2025, Mixed media, 74 x 14 x 14 cm, 29.13 x 5.51 x 5.51 in. Copyright/credits: © Galerie Bernard Jordan. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Bernard Jordan.
• Perrine Boudy, Valet de cœur, 2024, Engobe on red earthenware, 69 x 47 x 53 cm, 27.17 x 18.5 x 20.87 in. Copyright/credits: © Perrine Boudy. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Rita Zurbrügg, Untitled, 2024, Ceramic, engobed and glazed, 21 x 24 x 13 cm, 8.27 x 9.45 x 5.12 in. Copyright/credits: © Rita Zurbrügg. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Clare Goodwin, Ceramic Whisper/Still Scape, 2026, Hand cut/Hand glazed ceramic, Left: 30 x 21 cm, 11.81 x 8.27 in., Right: 33 x 25 cm, 12.99 x 9.84 in. Copyright/credits: © Clare Goodwin. Courtesy of the artist and Lullin + Ferrari.
• Guillaume Martin-Taton, Krotok, 2024, Glazed earthenware, 37.5 x 27.5 x 31 cm, 14.76 x 10.83 x 12.2 in. Copyright/credits: © Guillaume Martin-Taton. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Sarah Dwyer, Hone-Onna, 2024, Glaze, engobe, earthenware, 37 x 32 x 23 cm, 14.57 x 12.6 x 9.06 in. Copyright/credits: © Sarah Dwyer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Yulia Iosilzon, Reflections, 2026, Glazed stoneware on wood, 66 x 76 cm, 25.98 x 29.92 in. Copyright/credits: © Yulia Iosilzon. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang. Photo: Deniz Güzel.