Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation is on view at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, Concord, MA

March 21 – April 18, 2026

Curated by Michael Dika

Lucy Lacoste Gallery is honored to present the ground-breaking group exhibition Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation, up through April 18, 2026 in Concord Massachusetts. Evolving Clay invites viewers into a space where ancient material meets contemporary art for radical storytelling and cultural reclamation. Curated by ceramist and professor Michael Dela Dika of Ghana, in collaboration with Lucy Lacoste Gallery, the exhibition traces clay’s expansive journey from its utilitarian roots to its reimagining as a vehicle for political commentary and spiritual depth.

Participating Artists: Eugene Ofori Agyei, Audrey An, Paul S. Briggs, Gerald Brown, Michael Dela Dika, Josephine Larsen, Roberto Lugo, Murjoni Merriweather, Janina Myronova, Teddy Osei, Larry Ossei-Mensah, Isaac Scott, Raelis Vasquez

Evolving Clay: The Group Show That Defines a Cultural Moment

By Margarita Lila Rosa

In Roberto Lugo’s, What Had Happened Was: The Path, from the Orange and Black Series (2024), a group of self-emancipated Black folks maroon into freedom. This history of Black people who fled slavery is a quiet, sparsely documented history, and told mostly through the newspaper columns and laws that criminalized those who sought their freedom by running away. Lugo’s work documents Black history through stories of dignity. The Philadelphia born-and-raised Puerto Rican artist is quickly becoming one of the most important ceramicists of our time.

Roberto Lugo’s practice forms the perfect backdrop to explore the role of ceramics today, particularly among ceramicists of color, who are carving out new ways to consider object making as a form of storytelling. Take the artist Larry Ossei-Mensah, Ghanian artist and curator, who sees his emerging clay practice as an exploration of how movement informs perceptions. Ossei-Mensah’s highly gestural practice is informed by a carefully learned instinct—a tact that reflects his own global movement. The symbolically charged small works by Ossei-Mensah reflect small gestures, tete-a-tetes, and minute moments of a collective human experience.

The exhibition Evolving Clay: Where Tradition Meets Transformation, presented at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, and curated by Ghanian artist and curator Michael Dela Dika, explores the responsiveness of clay to story, identity, and movement. With this exhibition, Raelis Vasquez, a Dominican painter who has long explored themes of migration, labor, and Black Dominican quotidian life, has shown his largest collection of sculpture works to date. This collection of six “busts”, created from stoneware, features unassuming, everyday people, in a style that reflects the simplicity of local countryside life. Carved with the same dignity as his paintings, these new sculptures point to a further exploration of the artist’s monumentalization of Dominican country life.

Defying the conventions of Renaissance portraiture—where the face was a site of restraint, proportion, and moral ambivalence—Murjoni Merriweather constructs a radically different visual language. Her works are approachable and familiar, marked by a rich dialogue with familial and cultural history. Her heavily stylized sculptures present monumentalized figures whose features resist the classical demand for realism. Instead of individualized likeness, we encounter centuries of black lineage and beauty, alongside a cultural motif— teeth adorned with stacked grills that shimmer through centuries of illegibility. The long neck, displayed on high pedestals, are meant to affirms the gravitas of Black contemporary life.

Isaac Scott’s timely Land of the Free? (2026) reflects on the destruction of democratic institutions in the United States, almost making its year of completion part of the name itself. This sculpture, alongside his Marvin Gaye (2026), eerily reflects the state of Black life that Gaye sung about in tracks like, “What’s Happening Brother” and “Inner City Blues (Make me Wanna Holler”). The question mark in Land of the Free? introduces a critical uncertainty, prompting reflection on the status of freedom as a political and social reality. Considered together, the two works establish a dialogue across time, positioning Gaye’s observations as enduring points of reference for understanding the present. Certainly, the present moment does make us wanna holler, and perhaps even question whether our most reliable institutions and monuments mean anything at all. Scott’s sculptures are not plainly figurative; they are an act of storytelling. Other artists in the show include Paul S. Briggs, Murjoni Merriweather, Gerald Brown, Michael Dela Dika, Eugene Agyei, Teddy Osei, Audrey An, Janina Myronova, and Josephine Larsen.

Exploring pottery and sculpture through thirteen contemporary artists, Ghanian artist and curator Michael Dela Dika has achieved a feat that is most necessary to concretize an art historical moment: surveying the contemporary moment. In a conversation with Dika, he noted this idea came from his desire to “capture the transformative power of traditional storytelling through clay,” and “record a multicultural language.” The exhibition is an ambitious exploration of contemporary clay artists, at a moment when material history, tradition, and cultural pride are being chipped at, at a structural level.

Contact
info@lucylacoste.com

Lucy Lacoste Gallery
25 Main Street
Concord MA, 01742
United States

Photos courtesy of the gallery and artists

Julia Phillips’ Inside, Before They Speak in The Curve at London’s Barbican is surely as sparse as exhibitions get. It is with great economy that Phillips populates the space with objects exuding a spine-tingling strangeness that simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer. This dual effect is not surprising when you understand the deep psychoanalytic roots of the artist’s practice, her fascination with the inside surfaces of things and a desire to explore what we might project onto the object, perhaps even into the negative space it creates. Of course, this is not simply about surfaces, but an insightful and utterly thrilling interrogation that exposes interior depths in an extraordinarily original fashion. Inside, Before They Speak also asks who is speaking. For Phillips, there are a broad range of possible voices in her work ¬– a spiritual or ancestral presence, an infantile pre-speech presence and other subjects that cannot speak, or choose not to. The charged silence speaks loudly in this space.

With ceramics firmly at the heart of her sculptural practice, Phillips uses casting and hand building techniques to create moulds from parts of her own body, or to form uncanny objects that cast fear and doubt in the beholder. Clay elements are fired and glazed in electric kilns (using cone 6 for glaze firing) to create vibrant surface effects. Applying a variety of underglazes, raw pigments and glazes, Phillips explains that multiple layers of underglaze and glazes are applied and refired, up to twelve times, until the desired depth and colour tone of the surface is achieved. It is only then that the artist incorporates metal hardware such as clasps and springs. Together these components imbue the objects with the possibility of movement where clasps can be fastened and unfastened and springs can be compressed or extended. For Phillips, this also acts as a metaphor for human relations (bonds and attachments in psychoanalytic terms) and the degree of strength or weakness with which they are wrought. It is a delicate balance to be achieved between the fragility of the ceramic elements and the strength of the associated metal hardware elements. Often held in acute tension, it is as if they are in exact equilibrium, the product of precision, yet the tiniest recalibration could destroy each and every meticulously established bond and attachment. These relationships under pressure are also metaphors for human relations.

Walking along the full arc of The Curve, it becomes clear that the exhibition falls into three distinct areas. The first section contains four works: Drainer III (2026), Harmonizer (2026), Attachment I with Ball Detent (2023) and Attachment V, Flexible with Quick Release (2024). As Phillips explains in an interview with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Dr Gail Lewis, she glazes skin surfaces in palladium, a shiny silver glaze that is applied in layers in order to attain the required tone, or degree of silver. This is particularly noticeable in Drainer III. A thin slab of clay was pushed and pressed against the artist’s body to create a moulded fragment that follows the underside of upper legs, the curve of buttocks and more intimate details. The process involves the artist remaining in contact with the clay until it is dry enough to hold its own weight and shape to allow firing and glazing to take place. Suspended above average head-height by two stainless steel cables, the piece hangs over a stainless-steel base with a central drain hole – the titular drainer. In previous iterations – Drainer I (2018) and Drainer II (2021) – the base was constructed from concrete and limestone respectively, both porous materials. Now, against the Brutalist concrete of the Barbican’s interior, a fabricated stainless steel base lends further interest and strangeness to Drainer III and a non-porous and chillingly clinical character that is unique to this new iteration. We might imagine the broken body leaking into the drainer. The exposed interior of the ceramic fragment, thick and fleshy and vital, turns our imaginings to the medicalized body, and the medicalized female body in particular. Sliced open and exposed, with little context, this broken body leaks fluids and ideas, and reflects our own mental and physical infirmities. It is at the fault-lines, or points of weakness, that we perhaps identify most with other human beings. In Phillips’s work, we recognise those fault lines, but not as flaws. Rather, the human response is to soften, to project comfort and healing. In this way, we gaze upon and speak to the sculpture, just as it gazes at and speaks back to us.

Harmonizer (2026) consists primarily of two partial clay moulds of the artist’s face. Mask-like in form, they are glazed in a similar fashion to Drainer III with reflective palladium glaze on the exterior surface and a fleshy finish of reds and pinks inside. In this instance, however, the pinkness is visible through the mouth, bringing the inside out and imbuing the work with a sense of vulnerability. The faces are mounted at differing heights and angles on a stainless steel armature. On top of the central supporting column is a ceramic microphone, ready to harmonise voices and ideas. Further, despite its solid armature, there is the possibility of sudden movement contained within this object as its freely adjustable wingnuts might be manipulated at any moment. This risk, for it feels risky, is further underlined by the ceramic faces whose open mouths and blank eyes (both simple matters of the casting process) appear as expressions of shock and its attendant emotions, both requiring our remediation.

This first section of the show is completed with two rather menacing works which, nonetheless, speak to questions of human attachment, as indeed their titles indicate. Attachment I with Ball Detent (2023) and Attachment V, Flexible with Quick Release (2024), as with earlier works in this exhibition, include stainless steel elements such as hooks, screws, and other hardware. The bronze elements of these two objects suggest grips, places to hold and attach to, or to let go and release. Attachment V is particularly interesting since, despite its alarming appearance, it includes one pair of adult-size grips and a much smaller pair of child-sized grips. Perhaps these works gesture to the emotional, if not physical, brutality that can be present within adult-child relationships of all sorts. A previous iteration of this work from 2022 included coloured ceramic grips rather than brass ones. In that instance the ceramic adult grips were glazed in matt purple while the child-sized grips were glazed in matt lemon-yellow. Both the 2022 and 2024 iterations included medical PVC tubes forming part of the physical connection between adult and child but in each they create a very different sense of their function. In the 2022 iteration with its brightly coloured ceramic grips, the PVC tubes suggest something supportive and life-giving. In the more recent brass-grip work, as shown in this exhibition, the PVC tubes appear less nourishing than draining, and demonstrate something of the power of materials in meaning-making.

The focus shifts in the middle section of this exhibition where a pair of floor-standing sculptures ¬– Inseminator and Fertilizer, both from 2026 – flank a series of drawings, Assisted Conception Drawings (I–IV): I (Un)viable Embryo, II Double Zygote, III Fresh Transfer, and IV Cryopreserved Embryo, all (2025–26). These potent works were created by the artist while in conversation with a friend who is undergoing donor-assisted artificial conception. The titles of the drawings are taken from terms used in in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technology. These are techniques that occur at a microscopic scale but Phillips draws them much enlarged. There is also a balance of chance and engineering, or precision, in the artist’s techniques that echoes the IVF methods, meticulously carried out but ultimately reliant on chance and natural process. Inseminator and Fertilizer, the two sculptural works that flank the display of drawings, are astounding examples of Phillips’s ability to evoke the uncanny and unsettle the viewer with one tiny detail after another. Both works include a specially fabricated stainless steel table with a round tray top and four thin legs that slope inward as they descend to form a four-point base that supports everything. If this was made of wood, we might expect it to be positioned beside an armchair and holding a cup of coffee. In this instance, however, each table top supports a strange object, something that appears, to all intents and purposes, an instrument of gynecological torture. The objects combine stainless steel hardware with ceramic elements that appear to be moveable. The titles of these two works, Inseminator and Fertilizer, and their size and portability suggest they could be manipulated and pressed into the service of IVF, despite the obvious impracticalities of their aesthetic condition.

The final section of the exhibition contains three works – the superbly fleshy Suspended Interior I (2026) and Suspended Interior II (2026), alongside Mediator III (2025–26). The two Suspended Interior pieces appear to be of human origin, despite being larger than life in scale. Recalling intestinal folds, tumorous masses and fleshy forms, these hollow hanging objects include the partial imprint of the artist’s hand grip within them, as if hanging on for dear life. Suspended Interior I hangs from a single heavy spring and is connected to three plastic tubes which could equally indicate nourishment or depletion. Suspended Interior II hangs from four springs in tension with a fixed metal armature. The multiple tensions at play here suggest an object poised to disintegrate under the pressures imposed upon it.

Mediator III, the final object in the exhibition, sees two ceramic partial chest moulds mounted at opposite ends of a stainless steel T-bar and held in place with nylon hardware studs. The entire structure is mounted on a circular slab of granite. The moulds are of the artist’s concave chest, the body shape that is formed when you stretch both arms forwards and the chest is forced to recede, or hollow out. (It is worth noting that in previous iterations such as Mediator (2020) the chest is in its convex form, pushing forward, not back.) In the centre of the T-bar, a ceramic microphone is mounted on the top-most point and acts, in some strange way, as a grounding element. This makes sense if we think of the microphone as a metaphor for communication and as a mode of mediation between the opposing human elements – the ceramic chest fragments. The sense of momentum between them and the circular granite base spin us around to face back where we came from and survey the show in reverse.

Ultimately, Phillips’ works in this exhibition concern human relationships, communication and mediation. What stories do we tell each other without words? How does our gaze fall on others and theirs fall on us? How does our internal psychic apparatus project upon other people and objects? And how do they project upon to us? How to we engage with the negative space in the work? As Phillips anticipates, “I’m hoping the viewer will complete the work for themselves and fit their realities.” It is a generous intention.

Beth Williamson is an art historian and writer specialising in modern and contemporary art in Britain, with a particular interest in art education, craft, and ceramics. A former Research Fellow at Tate, she co-curated the exhibition Basic Design at Tate Britain in 2013 and has written widely on British art and pedagogy. Her essays and reviews on art, craft and ceramics have appeared in publications such as The Art Newspaper, Sculpture magazine, Studio International, and Ceramic Review.

Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak is on view at the Barbican, London, between January 30 and April 19, 2026.

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Captions

• Featured image: Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Installation View of Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Drainer III, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Harmonizer, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Attachment I with Ball Detent, 2023 and Attachment V, Flexible with Quick Release, 2024 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Installation View of Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Harmonizer, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Fertilizer, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Inseminator, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Assisted Conception Drawings (I–IV) by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Suspended Interior II, 2026 and Mediator III, 2025–26 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Suspended Interior II, 2026 and Suspended Interior I, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Suspended Interior II, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Suspended Interior I, 2026 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery
• Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak. Mediator III, 2025–26 by Julia Phillips. Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak Installation View, Fri 30 Jan—Sun 19 Apr 2026 © Thomas Adank & Barbican Art Gallery

Sharif Bey: Autoethnography is on view at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, New York

February 12 – July 19, 2026

“Autoethnography,” a new exhibition of work by the groundbreaking artist Sharif Bey, is currently on view at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. The exhibition provides important examples from all of Bey’s central bodies of work¬—ranging from wheel-thrown vessels to intricate figurative sculptures, from gargantuan necklace forms to imposing ceramic shields—while highlighting in particular the transition between his functional pottery and figurative sculpture.

At the young age of ten Sharif Bey discovered, in the Carnegie Museum where he was enrolled in an after-school program, many of the ingredients that were to form the basis of his entire artistic practice. Wandering the museum, his encounters with both the bones of the natural history wing and the comprehensive collection of the art wing planted seeds that were to grow steadily throughout his life. Of particular note was his encounter with an nkisi n’kondi (or “power figure”) created by someone from the ancient Kongo peoples of central and west Africa, whose culture stretches back for millennia. Perhaps it was because it united the two wings of the museum, somehow appearing as both natural and cultural, as both the product of human agency and something radiating an otherworldly power, that it left such an impression.

This idea of objects as vessels of mysterious energy, as containers of spirit, ancestry and power remains tangible in Bey’s work today. In his book All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley describes his own reaction to encountering an nkisi. He writes, “It wasn’t meant to look like a divine being; it was the divine being and, as such, had to appear as though it existed across a chasm from ordinary human efforts. It had to look a bit like a newborn baby looks: Not an imitation or depiction of anything, but rather a new, miraculous, self-insistent whole.” These words express very well the reaction one has after encountering Sharif Bey’s work for the first time. Here art is not an imitation of nature, or of anything else for that matter, but a genuine act of creation, bringing forth something radically new into the world. Whether in the figurative nkisi-like vessels, the “protest shields,” the gargantuan necklaces of his “Adornment” series, the monumental figures of the “Guardians” series, or his richly textured pottery, Bey endeavors to create touchstones of power.

At the same time, this sense of the sui generis nevertheless originates somewhere, and this is where the “autoethnography” of the exhibition’s title comes into play. Autoethnography goes beyond the linear history of autobiography to explore one’s connection to broader socio-cultural contexts, to bring to the surface the sometimes hidden and sometimes overt cultural forces that help make us who we are. In Bey’s own words, the question is not simply “Who am I?” but rather “Who am I in relation to who we are?” In his case this often involves understanding himself in the context of the past and present African diaspora, and much of his work directly engages with specific African and Afro-diasporic traditions. But his work also directly reflects his many other shifting cultural identities: As a former teenager from a large family in 1990’s Pittsburgh; as a devoted husband and father; as a highly-trained educator, and as someone deeply versed in American studio ceramic history who, from a young age, was fortunate enough to work with some of the most well-known ceramic artists of the time through the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild and summer workshops around the country.

Hence Bey’s varied work draws on many divergent sources simultaneously and suggests a deliberate tug-of-war of influences and interpretations, illustrating his interest in “how the meaning of icons and function transform across cultures and time.” After all, the nkisi figure Bey encountered in the Carnegie, for all its power, is also an icon of colonial violence, an artifact ripped from its original context and preserved under plexiglass for a colonial audience. At the same time, the Kongo figures that most closely resemble Bey’s work are in fact a form of nkisi n’kondi known as Mangaaka, which were made in the 19th century as a direct response to colonial violence. The nails and shards embedded in Bey’s work can easily be read as sources of violence and affliction, yet in the tradition from which they derive the nails were often embedded into a figure as an act of taking an oath, making a promise, or ensuring peace between rivals. The “beads” of the large necklace forms of the “Adornment” series were taken from the shapes of bones, bird-skulls or claws, shifting the aesthetic context not only in scale but also from the natural to the cultural. A functional vessel might suggest African patterns but also reveal the influence of David MacDonald and Winnie-Owens Hart (whom he has described as important mentors) or other well-known American ceramicists like Val Cushing, Robert Turner, Norm Schulman or Ed Eberle.

At a time when “identity politics” continues to dominate contemporary discourse, and many artists turn to their own identities as sources of inspiration, Sharif Bey’s work goes beyond the solipsism of autobiography to reveal a brilliant ethnographic process that situates the individual rightly in a complex sea of cultural forces.

Contact
ceramicsmuseum@alfred.edu
+1 607-871-2421

Alfred Ceramic Art Museum
2 Pine Street
Alfred, NY 14802
United States

Photos courtesy of Alfred Ceramic Art Museum

Come, let’s commune together.

Andile Dyalvane

Before clay becomes vessel, sculpture, or form, it is earth. It is the ground beneath our feet, the material from which objects have been shaped across cultures and continents. It precedes borders and disciplines, linking humanity through shared acts of making, care, and survival. In this sense, clay is not simply a medium but a common ground, an ancestral matter that holds memory, continuity, and relation. Yet materials do not speak on their own. How clay is understood, framed, and valued depends on the perceptual frameworks through which it is encountered.

How we look at art is never neutral. Vision is shaped by inherited structures, disciplinary habits, and historical power relations that determine what is seen, how it is interpreted, and what remains invisible. For much of its history, art from the African continent has been approached through Western epistemologies that often isolated objects from their cultural, spiritual, and relational contexts. Meaning was extracted, translated, and stabilised according to external categories, while other ways of knowing – embodied, communal, cosmological – were marginalised or dismissed.

Contemporary African artists are challenging this legacy, not only through what they make, but through how their work asks to be encountered. Rather than presenting objects to be deciphered, their practices call for forms of attention grounded in listening, sensing, and relational presence. This shift demands a parallel transformation in curatorial and critical approaches: a willingness to loosen singular modes of seeing and to engage artworks on their own cultural and ontological terms.

It is within this context that Andile Dyalvane’s exhibition iNgqweji takes place. Installed at Southern Guild in Cape Town from 22 November 2025 to 29 January 2026, iNgqweji (“bird’s nest” in isiXhosa) reveals a ceramic landscape shaped by deserts, forests, and caves. Organic forms extend throughout the space, animated by saturated colours and richly worked surfaces. The exhibition brings ceramics into dialogue with free-blown glass, hand-forged copper, light, and sound, through collaborations with composer Dr Nkosenathi Koela, glassblower David Reade, and blacksmith Conrad Hicks.

Process, Material, and Relation in iNgqweji

The exhibition’s point of departure lies not in the studio, but in a pilgrimage. To honour the legacy of Credo Mutwa – a Zulu traditional healer whose teachings sought to restore precolonial cosmologies after centuries of colonial erasure – Dyalvane travelled with fellow practitioners across the Karoo to Mutwa’s home in Kuruman, in the Northern Cape.

For Dyalvane, travel is a way of connecting to land – its history and its living presence – and forms a central mode of embodied engagement in his practice. Along the journey, he was struck by the vast communal nests of the Sociable Weaver birds: intricate structures composed of hundreds of chambers. Within these nests, shaped by a complex social organisation, he recognised a form of collective intelligence and relationality that would become central to iNgqweji.

Carrying this awareness of relational intelligence and ecological attunement into the gallery, the exhibition was preceded not by a conventional opening, but by a ritual act, an activation through offering.¹ Inside the gallery, Dyalvane performed a ceremony intended to energise the works and situate them within a living spiritual continuum. The act made explicit what would otherwise remain implicit: that these ceramic forms are not inert objects awaiting interpretation, but presences.

Dyalvane later shared with me his wish that this ceremony could take place outdoors, within his community, where the works can be experienced and “can live there, get the dust and the smoke, feel the sound of the birds and the wind.” (Dyalvane, 2025). Even within the controlled space of the gallery, however, the ceramics retain a vitality that exceeds their physical form. They carry energy, shaping how they interact with the viewer, the space, and one another.

Andile Dyalvane is widely recognised as one of the most significant ceramic artists working on the African continent today. At the core of his practice lies a sustained engagement with ancestry, land, and spiritual continuity. His ceramic works function as vessels through which memory, healing, and cultural transmission are activated.

Born in 1978 in the rural village of Ngobozana, near Qobo-Qobo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Dyalvane grew up immersed in agricultural life, tending cattle and working the land alongside his family. This formative relationship with soil, landscape, and seasonal rhythms continues to shape his practice. Clay – umhlaba, meaning “earth” or “mother earth” in isiXhosa – is not simply a material resource but a living substance, inseparable from lineage and responsibility. To work with clay is to remain in dialogue with the land and with Xhosa ancestral knowledge systems that understand matter as alive, responsive, and relational.

Dyalvane’s process begins with drawing. Sketching functions less as technical preparation than as a practice of listening and reception. Forms emerge through recurring visions, sometimes prompted by sound, observation, or movement through nature. When encountering the Sociable Weaver nests, he began with detailed, almost naturalistic drawings, before gradually reworking these motifs through successive sketches, allowing images to shift from observation to interpretation.

From drawing, Dyalvane moves to the making of small clay models, using them to test proportion, structure, surface, and colour before translating forms into larger works. This incremental approach allows the work to unfold over time rather than being imposed upon.

Collaboration is central to his practice. Dyalvane works closely with craftspeople he admires, not as ancillary contributors but as co-makers who expand the scale, resonance, and vitality of the work. Through these collaborations, ceramics becomes a collective act of making, mirroring the communal intelligence that inspired these works.

Sound plays a particularly integral role. Several ceramic works contain embedded microphones or speakers that transmit recordings of birds, wind, and environmental soundscapes. Copper bristles integrated into the ceramic forms function as musical instruments, allowing the sculptures to vibrate and resonate, animating the clay and activating it as a sonic body.

In one suspended ceramic work resembling a weaver’s nest, an opening at the base invites bodily proximity. During my visit, Andile invited me to stand beneath it. He then struck the copper bristles with drumsticks, producing harmonic tones reminiscent of tongue drums. The sound enveloped the body, collapsing the boundary between listener and object. Language felt almost beside the point. This was not an encounter premised on interpretation, but one rooted in sensation, resonance, and presence.

Such experiences align with a growing understanding of art not as an object to be explained, but as an event that happens to the viewer.

Relational Being, Experience, and African Philosophical Thought

Ways of seeing are shaped by underlying assumptions about what the world is made of and how beings relate to one another. These assumptions often remain unspoken, operating as silent frameworks that guide perception in advance. When such frameworks are treated as universal, they obscure the existence of other ways of being through which art and material culture are understood.

Anthropologist Philippe Descola has shown how Western modernity is structured by a worldview that separates nature from culture, subject from object, and material from spirit. Within this scheme, artworks are approached as discrete entities, detached from the relational worlds that produced them and positioned for analysis and classification. Practices grounded in relational, spiritual, or ecological ontologies are often misread through this lens, not because they lack complexity, but because the mode of perception itself is ill-equipped to recognise them.

John Dewey offers a parallel critique from within Western philosophy. In Art as Experience, he argues that art does not reside in isolated objects but emerges through lived experience, in the dynamic interaction between material, environment, and perceiver. When art is severed from the conditions of life and absorbed into abstract systems of explanation, it risks becoming something to be deciphered rather than encountered.

These perspectives suggest that the challenge is perceptual. When African artistic practices who draw from indigenous knowledge are approached through concepts that privilege detachment and objecthood, their relational dimensions are rendered invisible. What is required then is not simply new interpretive categories, but an openness to encountering art as a field of relations.

African philosophical traditions offer crucial insight within this space of reorientation. Philosopher J.M. Nyasani articulates a relational understanding of being through his analysis of the “I” and the “We.” In African philosophy, personhood does not precede relation but comes into being through it. The self is constituted through relationships with others, with ancestors, with land, and with the material world. Being is distributed across a network of relations that sustain life and meaning.

Read through this lens, iNgqweji resists the logic of detached spectatorship. Instead, it activates a shared field of experience in which ceramics, sound, space, memory, and bodies co-presence one another. Meaning unfolds through proximity and participation. The viewer becomes part of the “We” that the work brings into being.

This relationality extends beyond the human. Nyasani emphasises that African conceptions of being do not rigidly separate subject and object, or culture and nature. Ancestors, landscapes, materials, and spiritual forces are not inanimate substances but active participants in communal life. Clay, in this context, is matter that holds memory, continuity, and responsibility. Dyalvane’s ceramics operate within this understanding, insisting on clay’s capacity to act, resonate, and connect.

Mogobe Ramose further clarifies the ethical dimension of relation. For Ramose, relational being entails responsibility: to exist is already to be accountable to others within the network of relations that makes existence possible. Ethics arises not as an abstract system but as an embodied practice rooted in interdependence, where human and more-than-human presences participate in sustaining balance.

Within this orientation, iNgqweji calls for reverence and attentiveness toward all forms of life. Clay becomes a mediator between earthly matter and ancestral memory, while making emerges as a practice of listening, responsibility, and care. Sound is also important in rendering this relational field tangible. It operates not as accompaniment but as connective force, binding bodies, materials, and space. Vibrations move through air and body alike, collapsing distance between source and listener.

Hence, Dyalvane’s work can be understood not as an exhibition that transmits meaning from object to viewer, but as an event that gathers relations into presence. The ceramics do not ask what they signify; they ask how we participate. They invite us to slow down, listen, and recognise ourselves as part of a wider relational world.

Conclusion

For a long time, art from the African continent has been encountered through a predominantly Western gaze, one that has often misread its forms, meanings, and functions by filtering them through frameworks not their own.

This terrain is changing, as artists, curators, and scholars increasingly challenge inherited hierarchies and advocate for more culturally informed and critical approaches that acknowledge the plurality of worldviews embedded within artistic practice. Such a shift requires relinquishing the assumption that a single visual, historical, or theoretical framework can account for all forms of cultural expression. To continue telling others’ stories through one dominant narrative is to reproduce the very limitations that have long constrained understanding. As Dyalvane has articulated, “you’ll need to understand what I represented with the work. It’s not representing me, it represents my whole community, my family, this continent.” (Dyalvane, 2025) Curators and galleries, in this sense, are not neutral intermediaries but participants in a relational process that carries ethical responsibility.

If you want to curate a work of an artist from a village in Africa you’ve never met, you’ve never drank the water from that place, sat in front of the fire and danced in the dust during the ceremony with this person, how are you going to respect that person and tell their story? That’s very important for me. So, come, let’s commune together. Make an effort to come and meet the community. It’s important that you meet the people, and the ancestors. If you’ve been guided to tell a story and meet the people, by the time you’re done experiencing their story, you’re going to come back a different person, because now you understand, you’ll be respectful in how you tell the story and you’ll be respected and trusted by the people to tell their story.

Dyalvane, 2025

What is at stake, then, is not simply representation, but perception itself. To encounter the work of another culture demands an openness to seeing beyond one’s own coordinates, to enter the world of the other. This involves slowing down, listening attentively, and allowing meaning to emerge through relation rather than projection. In doing so, iNgqweji gestures toward a mode of being-with grounded in care, reciprocity, and the shared earth from which we all emerge.

Monica Monaia is an emerging ceramic artist whose work spans between South Africa and Italy. With a degree in Theology, from the Pontifical Lateran University (Assisi, Italy), she writes about culture, identity, and ceramics, exploring the intersections of heritage, personal experience, and creative expression. Her artistic practice is deeply influenced by her mixed Italian, Ethiopian and Eritrean heritage, and she engages with themes of belonging, visibility, and the role of ceramics in shaping cultural narratives. Monica currently serves as project manager of Tazzinart South Africa, a ceramics exhibition connecting artists from Italy, South Africa, and beyond.

iNgqweji by Andile Dyalvane was on view at Southern Guild in Cape Town between November 22, 2025, and January 29, 2026.

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Captions

• Andile Dyalvane, 2025. Images courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.
• Andile Dyalvane, 2025. Images courtesy of Hlalanathi Radebe/Southern Guild.
• Andile Dyalvane, 2025. Images courtesy of Lea Crafford/Southern Guild.

References

1. Descola, Philippe. L’arte prima dell’arte. Translated by Alberto Frolin. Marsilio Arte. 2024
2. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. University of Chicago Press, 2013. (Originally published in French, 2005)
3. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Perigee Books, 1934.
4. Dyalvane, Andile. Interview. Conducted by Monica Monaia. Cape Town, 24 Nov. 2025.
5. Nyasani, J.M. “The Ontological Significance of ‘I’ and ‘We’ in African Philosophy.” Journal of African Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003, pp. 45–62.
6. Ramose, Mogobe B. African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Harare: Mond Books, 1999.

Théo Ouaki: Marginalia Fabulae is on view at La peau de l’ours, Bruxelles

March 15 – April 25, 2026

Marginalia refers to the figures and annotations that, in the Middle Ages, occupied the margins of manuscripts. Far from being merely decorative, they constituted a parallel space of reading, mobilizing symbols, beliefs, and secondary narratives to comment on the world from its edges, at the margins of the central text.

With Marginalia Fabulae, I reactivate this principle of lateral reading in order to approach contemporary mass and everyday life, understood as ensembles traversed by networks of signs and symbolic structures. The exhibition brings together exclusively ceramic sculptures, wall-mounted high reliefs and figures in the round conceived as material annotations of reality.

The high reliefs unfold as dense, compartmentalized surfaces, evoking systems of organization and circulation. The figures in the round extend this logic: although detached from the wall, they also appear caught within structures that exceed the individual. Together, the works compose a plastic vocabulary grounded in hybridity, proliferation, and the interweaving of bodies and forms.

The grotesque and fabulation, inherited from medieval marginalia, generate here an open symbolic language. Superstition is approached as a mode of thinking through resonance, without omen or univocal interpretation, leaving the viewer free to move between the signs.

Entirely made of ceramic, the works inscribe this fabulation within an archaic and irreversible material historically linked to use and ritual. Marked by gesture and accident, fired clay gives the forms an almost talismanic dimension, where the symbolic settles without ever closing upon itself.

Marginalia Fabulae thus proposes a lateral reading of the present, where the margin becomes an active space for the production of meaning, revealing the symbolic structures that traverse everyday life. These forms take shape within a daily studio practice, nourished by the repetition of gestures and by attention to minor narratives and discreet signs that persist at the edge of the visible.

Text by Théo Ouaki

Contact
info@lapeaudelours.net

La peau de l’ours
Rivoli Building
Rue Emile Claus, 55
1050 Ixelles
Belgium

Photos courtesy of the gallery

Arina Antonova: Shekel & Anubis Agency is on view at Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris

March 21 – April 29, 2026

Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise presents Arina Antonova Shekel & Anubis Agency, a ritual-based sculpture project curated by Azad Asifovich. Drawing inspiration from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the exhibition reimagines funerary urns, reliquaries, and mourning vessels not as sterile, industrially produced objects but as tactile, emotional, and customizable forms of radical care and transition. The series comprises nine stoneware urns – including a double urn conceived for a couple – five of which are elevated on a pyramid of nine stacked computer towers that conjures both ancient burial architecture and the digital afterlife. Completing the exhibition are a central fountain titled Fountain of Lamentation, three wall portals (Camellia Wall Portal, Sea Shell Wall Portal, and Textured Rock Wall Portal), and the Emotion Pearls & Emoji Charms Set, a collection of glazed ceramic objects offering a digital-age vocabulary of grief.

The public opening with brunch took place on 21 March (11h-21h), with a mid-show brunch on 11 April (11h-13h) and a finissage on 29 April (11h-21h).

Shaping Absence

Text by Dr. Lisa Hockemeyer

Death and mourning run like a red thread through the history of art and civilization. They have taken shape in countless forms: in religious and secular images such as memento mori, in reliquaries, tombs, and funerary architecture, and in personal objects such as mourning jewellery.

Yet among these, the urn, although integrated into the domestic sphere in many cultures and therefore a deeply personal object, has received remarkably little attention in art history, and even less in contemporary art.¹ Compared to other forms of commemoration, it appears the Cinderella of remembrance, often reduced to its function as a vessel for human remains. Its image in art history is frequently decorative or allegorical, associated with balusters, trompe l’oeil ornament, the romanticized language of Neoclassicism, or even the patterns of twentieth century textiles. In its tangible, functional form, however, the urn has often remained restrained, marked by minimal, often classical, or allegorical signs of death and mourning, or left entirely bare.

Across these traditions, death, even in its most glorified or embellished form, is ultimately confined to a fixed place, both physically and symbolically, while the mourner remains a witness rather than an active presence.

Arina Antonova’s work enters this space by reimagining the urn as an object that generates emotion and relation rather than presenting a static monument. Her urns are made as much for the deceased as for those who remain. They create a space of connection, both physical and metaphorical, inviting touch, pause, and reflection. Mourning becomes not a state to endure, but a lived experience moving through body, mind, and heart.

Antonova’s urns are belly-shaped sculptures, they continue her exploration of the vase, a form of profound significance to Antonova, who regards the vessel as the archetypal object of care. Since the beginning of time, it has held the substances of life such as food and water, serving as a symbolic bearer of nourishment and protection. In developing this body of work, Antonova turns to what she describes as the politics of form.² The vessel, in her understanding, is never neutral. Historically shaped through women’s labour of care, it has held sustenance and medicine, accompanied the dead in burial rituals, and borne witness to acts of tending and remembrance. These associations, she holds, persist today, as the emotional and practical responsibilities of caring for the elderly, organizing funerals, and sustaining memory continue to rest largely in women’s hands.³

Care, understood as a symbiosis between human beings and life, lies at the heart of Antonova’s work with form and matter. To her, clay is more than a medium; it is a living substance drawn from the earth, shaped by pressure, moisture, and time. Responsive to the slightest touch, it records gesture before hardening, preserving the movement of the hand as a lasting imprint. In this way, care is not simply represented but embedded within the material itself. Through the slow processes of forming and firing, touch becomes enduring, and memory settles into matter, carried in the surface as the quiet persistence of life.

Life is evoked most powerfully through references to nature. Through her masterful handling of material, colour, glaze, and decoration, Antonova opens layered and diverse meanings. Her practice resonates, unexpectedly, with the legacy of Bernard Palissy (1510-1590), whose vision extended beyond functional ceramics toward elaborate works in which snakes, plants, and animals were not allegories but celebrations of the living world in its material specificity.⁴

Organically formed, Antonova’s urns mimic the irregularities and textures of natural bodies and surfaces, conveying a sense of growth and vitality. Rooted in close observation of natural worlds, her vessels resemble micro ecosystems. They recall geological formations and draw from marine or botanical realms alike. Adorned with flowers, rocks, shells, and other organic forms, they evoke nature not as ornament but as a sensory and symbolic terrain. Nature becomes a custodian of memory, standing in for the places where one might wish to be laid to rest, transformed through glaze, colour, and texture into a tactile topography of remembrance.

Pink Lava Urn and Shiny Rocks Urn, for example, recall porous pumice or polished obsidian, one soft and cratered, the other sharp and reflective. Pebbles and smaller stones emerge from their surfaces turning the vessels into geological territories. Sea Shell Urn, Sea Urchin Urn and Venus Shell Urn draw from marine life, while Chrysantheme Urn and the double urn Heracléum belong to the realm of soil and growth. Crackled glazes and rough textures suggest dried earth and reef limestone, and are set against colourful sea urchins, anemone rims and ornate flower buds, some of them potentially poisonous. Might they be read as contemporary memento mori of the natural world?

The urns dissolve the boundary between aesthetic object and ritual function. Attention shifts from the depiction of the other toward the self as subject, and further toward participation, suggesting that care for the living is as essential to the ritual of mourning as care for the deceased. They draw from nature, cultural memory, and the symbolism of the digital age, including emojis, while offering space for personal tokens that may express and bridge individual and generational experience. Lustred objects in soft shapes of hearts, mouths, pebbles and spherical emojis expressing joy, contemplation, or sorrow accompany the urns, inviting touch and silent communication.

In this way, Antonova’s work echoes the quiet intimacy of a shrine. Like her Fountain of Lamentation which recalls the historic Fountain of Tears (1764)⁵ and its poetic transformation in Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s (1799-1837) The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, a work that embodies grief, lost love and eternal mourning, these forms create space for memory and personal gesture. Mourning becomes tactile and participatory. The living are invited to arrange, to linger and to remain for as long as remembrance unfolds. Antonova encourages those who stay to shape their mourning, understanding closure not as erasure but as transformation. Like the Heracleum, whose beauty conceals a latent toxicity, pain becomes integral to completion, physically sealing the container. Closure, then, is less an ending than a culmination.

Contact
arina.antonova@gmail.com
lamusee.art@gmail.com

The gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 2 pm-7 pm, and Saturday 11 am-7 pm, and by appointment

Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise
19 rue des Filles du Calvaire
75003 Paris
France

Installation views by Dmitry Kostyukov. All object photographs by Santino Lamorte.

Posted on March 30, 2026

The Digital Media and Visual Arts Department at Frostburg State University invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in studio art with expertise in sculpture and ceramics. Candidates should demonstrate a strong interdisciplinary creative practice and the ability to teach a broad range of approaches, including 3D Foundations. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and conceptually rich studio environment and seek a dynamic artist-educator who will contribute significantly to our undergraduate curriculum, mentorship, and creative activity. This position is available to begin in Fall 2026 for the main campus in Frostburg, Maryland. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience and qualifications. University System of Maryland benefits package included.

Responsibilities: The successful candidate will teach introductory and advanced courses in ceramics and sculpture, with the possibility of additional assignments such as Senior Portfolio, Art Appreciation, and 3-D Design, and will have the potential to develop courses in their area of expertise. Advising and mentoring students is performed by all faculty. The successful candidate will oversee multiple studio areas and a range of equipment, including a woodshop and ceramics studio and kilns. Duties will also include professional development activities, and service to the Department, College, University, and community.

Minimum Qualifications:
• MFA in ceramics, sculpture, or closely related field.
• Experience teaching in higher education.
• A background in multiple three-dimensional media.
• Experience with operating all facets of a ceramics studio, including kilns and glaze chemistry.
• Experience with operating all facets of a sculpture studio, including woodshop, metal fabrication, mold-making and casting materials (latex, paper, plaster).

Preferred Qualifications:
• Significant experience teaching a range of studio art courses in a higher education setting.
• Strong record of creative practice in at least one of the teaching fields.
• Demonstrated competencies in a variety of teaching methodologies and/or pedagogical approaches that reach a broad range of learners.
• Experience and familiarity with a learning management system (LMS) such as Brightspace, Blackboard, or Canvas.

About the University: A member institution of the University System of Maryland, Frostburg State University is a public, comprehensive, largely residential regional university offering programs in the sciences, education, business, the arts and humanities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. FSU prides itself on being a dynamic, learning-centered institution that emphasizes teaching with opportunities for professional development and research. More than 4,000 students enroll yearly.

About the Area: FSU is located on a scenic 260-acre campus in the mountains of Western Maryland, a region rich in history, quaint shopping areas and eclectic cafes and food choices. The Western Maryland region is considered a four-season outdoor hub of recreational experiences offering activities such as hiking, mountain biking, water sports, snow skiing/boarding, golfing, climbing, etc. Frostburg offers a family-friendly college town feel with easy access to major cities like Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and Baltimore. If you are looking for insightful colleagues, energetic students, and a great place to work and call home in a region with unlimited adventure seeking opportunities, FSU is for you!

Apply: Along with your application, please provide the following: 1) curriculum vitae; 2) a cover letter specifically addressing the requirements in this advertisement; 3) statement on teaching philosophy; 4) contact information for three professional references; 5) portfolio of candidate and candidate’s student’s work, and 6) unofficial transcripts of your graduate work.

For assurance of full consideration, please submit materials by 04/23/26.

This position is open until filled.

FSU is proud to be a diverse and inclusive multicultural university.

Frostburg State University welcomes and encourages women, veterans and minorities to apply and seeks to recruit and retain a diverse workforce. FSU is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Appropriate auxiliary aids and services for
qualified individuals with disabilities will be provided upon request. Please notify us in advance.

The New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan) invites ceramic artists from around the world to apply for the 2027 Taiwan Ceramics Residency Program, offering the opportunity to work in Yingge, one of Taiwan’s most significant ceramic centers. Residents will spend 60 to 90 days developing their practice within a fully equipped studio environment, while engaging with local craftspeople and ceramic traditions. The program provides material support, accommodation, and travel reimbursement. Applications are due June 30, 2026.

Applications are open for the Resident Artist Program at The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), offering early-career ceramic artists the opportunity to develop their practice within a dynamic community setting. The program provides free studio space for up to three years, a $250 monthly stipend, exhibition opportunities, and professional support. Open to US and international artists, the residency emphasizes community engagement, teaching, and collaboration. The next cohort begins September 1, 2026, and applications are due April 13, 2026.

A-B Projects will host State of Ceramics: The Power of Decoration – Rethinking Hierarchies, a two-part online conversation led by ceramic artist Anthony Sonnenberg on April 4 and April 11, 2026. The program explores how decoration—often historically marginalized in ceramics—can be reconsidered as a powerful cultural and political tool within contemporary practice. The first session features a lecture and Q&A, followed by a participatory discussion the following week. The events are free and open to the public, with registration required.

Ceramics Now is happy to share a new partnership with the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. Through their Supporting Member tier, you can now receive a free one-year subscription to Ceramics Now, alongside a range of museum benefits, including access to the North American Reciprocal Museum (NARM) network. For around $10/month, your membership supports exhibitions, education, and the care of an important ceramic collection, while keeping you connected to the global contemporary ceramics scene. It’s a meaningful way to support both organizations.

Applications are open for the 62nd International Ceramic Sculptural Symposium in Bolesławiec (Poland), taking place July 27 – August 21, 2026. Organized by the Bolesławiec Cultural Centre, the symposium will bring together artists from Poland and abroad to develop projects using local materials and factory facilities. This year’s theme, Sublime, invites reflections on transformation, materiality, and the unpredictability of working with clay and fire. Applications are open until April 17, 2026. The translation button is in the top right corner.

The Wayne Art Center invites submissions for CraftForms 2026, the 31st International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft, presented by the Wayne Art Center (US). Open to artists working across disciplines, including ceramics, fiber, glass, metal, and mixed media, the exhibition will take place from December 5, 2026, to January 23, 2027. Juried by Robert K. Liu and Patrick Benesh-Liu, the exhibition will award over $12,000 in prizes. Submissions are due September 9, 2026, with an entry fee of $50.

Mid-career ceramic artists are invited to apply for the McKnight Residency for Ceramic Artists at Northern Clay Center (US), a three-month residency supporting the development of new work and professional exchange. Up to three artists will be selected for residencies taking place in 2027, each receiving a $6,000 award, free studio space, and firing support. The program culminates in a group exhibition and catalogue, with a touring component. Applications close May 15, 2026.

Exhibitions

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

• Out of the Blue: Heidi Bjørgan and Kari Dyrdal at Taste Contemporary, Geneva
• Janny Baek: Life Forms at Joy Machine, Chicago
• Toshiaki Noda: (re)(de)constructing at Alison Bradley Projects, New York
• Dual Florescence: YehRim Lee and Chase Travaille at LaiSun Keane, Boston
• Janet Abrams: Balancing Acts at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
• « 10 » Ten Years of The Residency Program at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris

What’s on View

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

1. Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
2. Break the Mould at IKON Gallery, Birmingham
3. Jennifer King: Persistence of Vision at The Pit, Los Angeles
4. Yakimono: A Culture of Exchange – The Impact of Japanese Ceramics at Messums West, Tisbury
5. Bachelot & Caron: Porcelaine et faits divers at Musée d’art à Charleroi, Charleroi
6. Ted Secombe: Language of Glaze at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
7. AIR 2026: Compulsion at AMOCA – American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA
8. Kevin Umaña: Sanguine and Spiraling at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
9. Jennifer McCandless: You’re An Animal at Soapbox Arts, Burlington
10. Antonio Marras: Caos Calmo at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

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Featured image – Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, January 25 to May 25, 2026. Chenlu Hou: Courtesy of the artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Chiara No: Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Olympia Shannon

Jeanne Rimbert is a visual artist/ceramist born in Paris in 1985. After completing a DNAP (Diploma of Advanced Studies in Art) at the Beaux-Arts in Rueil-Malmaison, followed by a Master’s degree in graphic arts, her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Premier Regard and Galerie du Haut Pavé in Paris, as well as at the Musée Ariana in Geneva.

Rimbert has participated in exhibitions at institutions and venues such as the Centre d’art contemporain Aponia, Eglise Saint Merry, and the Bastille Design Center in Paris, as well as in international projects in Italy and Belgium. She has taken part in major events and festivals, including the Biennale de céramique contemporaine in Vallauris, Ceramic Art Andenne, and Salon Révélations at the Grand Palais in Paris.

The interior spaces and exterior landscapes she encounters, through chance discoveries, are the triggers for her installation work. Sculpture thus becomes a way of fossilising an imaginary moment within a physical reality.
Using earthenware or stoneware, the artist questions the place of ceramics in contemporary art. Clay becomes in turn painting, sculpture, installation, architecture or even performance.

Jeanne Rimbert deconstructs and reconstructs composite visions and fragments, thus modelling new landscapes. New universes that oscillate between the memory of what has been and the hope of what will be.

Visit Jeanne Rimbert’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Sea & Sky, 2024-2025

The fallen bodies land & The Banquet, 2023-2024

Wonderfull days!, 2022-2023

The sea will keep our memories

What might look like stalagmites emerge from the ground, reassuring symbols of an unchanging earthly anchorage.

They are a mass of fused materials: cracked like arid earth, flowing like water, frothy like foam, cottony like clouds. But don’t be fooled by appearances. Like a forest of masts in the middle of the ocean, my little blue and white boats will take their passengers either to a better future, or to shipwreck and oblivion.

Driven by the promise of a better future, they seek the sun towards a bluer tomorrow. On the black sea, under the white clouds. At the edge of the known world, where “the land and the sea hang together” ¹

The sails, made from worn clothing sewn together, are objects of memory, repositories of their owners’ lives. They are a constant reminder of human tragedies and the fleeting nature of our life plans.

The threads woven between the masts are like the ropes that hoist the sails. They make and break bonds, tie life together, untie life. They repair sails and pierce hearts.

(1) About the ocean, Pythéas de Marseille, 4th century BC

The sky will keep our memories

This display of abstract forms hangs on the wall like so many little clouds. Calling to the invisible, they inspire melancholy in the face of the transience of all things, inviting to contemplation as much as quest.

These sky-coloured amulets are surrounded by the cottony remnants of some childish reverie, whose white nebulae speckled with hope are gradually cracking.

Driven by a meditative process imbued with vulnerability and naivety, I tirelessly weave links of cotton, wool and metal around my grigris, using the lace scraps that my grandmother kept in her sewing box. Symbols of trust lost and regained, they ward off fate and heal wounds.

The knotting or wrapping that I do, both binding and holding, evokes a kind of ritual that transforms the material into an object with meaning and value.

The fallen bodies land

The fallen bodies land is a protean place where ceramics and salvaged objects meet in digressions that are at once architectural, carnal and religious.
Precarious flesh that builds, scaffolding phallic towers with dripping tops, fighting against the threat of a foretold expiration. Baroque architecture with an organic quiver. The materials argue and the colours cry out the neurosis of bodies wandering in this contemporary vanity that is as attractive as it is repulsive.

As an imperfect blend of art brut and popculture, of fanciful and even fantastical grafts of figures, icons and totems, the installation asserts a vulnerability that is imbued with naivety in the choice of forms and media, selected for their physical and symbolic qualities, and is in keeping with a definition of contemporary art as precarious.

This strange carnival invites the viewer to plunge into a universe where the sacred and the profane meet, creating a heterogeneous aesthetic that unabashedly blends the unbridled cruelty of Elizabethan theatre, the learned classicism of still life painting, the primitive magic of voodoo and the new icons of our over-consuming society.

The banquet

The banquet is an installation that invites us to sit down at the table, somewhere between mythological narrative and cannibalistic appetite.
Like its big sister The fallen bodies land, the banquet is an imperfect blend of art brut, pop culture and Elizabethan theatre; a ritual celebration with an organic thrill.

Composed of fanciful, even fantastical grafts between body parts (Titus Andronicus), voodoo (black virgin, string doll) and vanity, the installation exposes our turpitudes, calling on the sacred to fight against the threat of an impending expiry.

Captions

• The fallen bodies land – Piggy Bad Sow, 2023, glazed stoneware, 133×40 cm
• The fallen bodies land – installation, 2023, glazed stoneware, trashes, 144×250 cm
• The fallen bodies land – Worries, Amphora and Dead Apple, 2023, glazed stoneware, trashes, 100×180 cm
• The fallen bodies land – Dead Pirate Tower, 2023, glazed stoneware, 146×44 cm
• The Banquet, Table Installation – Masks, vase, red virgins, 2024, glazed stoneware, threads, 45x80x30 cm
• The Banquet, Ghost Hoodie, 2024, glazed earthenware, 14×19 cm
• The Banquet, Hanged Heads, 2024, waxed earthenware, 10×10 cm
• The Banquet, Small Hand, 2024, glazed earthenware, 14×9 cm
• The Banquet, Melted Apple, 2024, glazed stoneware, 17x20x20 cm
• The Banquet, Red Virgin, 2024, glazed stoneware, threads, 45x20x20 cm

Jeanne Rimbert: Wonderfull days!¹, 2022-2023

There, now, everything, right away. It’s pop, it’s fluorescent, it’s fun. Dynamic, joyful, pink-green-blue. Magical colours and graphic effervescence. It’s like the Mickey Mouse drawing we had at the bottom of our plastic plate. Since then, we’ve applied layers of lacquer to give the surface a shiny finish. But the tree has no more leaves, the bird is stuck in its oil puddle, the rabbit doesn’t look right. Let’s put some glitter and shine back on.

Mankind has become sufficiently alienated from itself to be able to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order.

(1) Samuel Beckett, Wonderfull days!

Captions

Wonderfull Days!, installation at Ariana Museum, 2022-2023, glazed earthenware, variable dimensions

Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng is an artist and educator based in Edinburg, Texas, where he leads the ceramics program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg campus. He holds an MFA in Ceramics from Illinois State University, USA, and a B.A. in Industrial Art (Ceramics) from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.

Japheth has exhibited widely both locally and internationally in esteemed institutions such as the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (Beaumont, Texas), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, Utah), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), University Galleries (Normal, Illinois), and DAAP Galleries (Cincinnati, Ohio). His works are part of the permanent collection at University Galleries and in private collections across the United States.

His artistic practice honors the legacy of Ghanaian ceramic history and its contemporary presence, drawing on complex cultural symbols with a spirit of openness and innovation. With over a decade of experience working with his favorite medium – clay – and a deep commitment to teaching, Japheth brings both technical skill and cultural sensitivity to the classroom and studio. Before moving to the United States for graduate studies, he served as a teaching technician at KNUST, Ghana. There, he was responsible for kiln and studio equipment maintenance, as well as sourcing and processing wild clay and glaze materials for the ceramics program. He has worked with and learned from notable ceramics professors, including Parpah Senanu Kwawukume and Jeannie Hulen, and contributed to research into the production of electrical porcelain, tile cement, and crucibles using wild clay and locally sourced materials.

Japheth is passionate about community engagement. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined a group of graduate students and an art history professor from Illinois State University to organize At the Table – a series of virtual dinners and conversations designed to foster community and vulnerability in a time of global isolation. The group developed discussion themes, recipes, and ceramic bowls, creating a space for empathy, camaraderie, and shared experience across different backgrounds.

Japheth is an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics and has served as Fellowship Coordinator on the Artaxis Board. He also contributed to NCECA through its Collaboration and Engagement Committee, reflecting his active role in shaping the future of ceramics through education, advocacy, and community. He graduated as Valedictorian from the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts at Illinois State University.

Visit Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2020-2025

Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng: Selected works, 2020-2025

My work engages with the profound legacy of Ghanaian ceramics, bridging its rich historical foundations with a bold contemporary vision. Drawing upon the intricate symbolism of Kente patterns in textiles and Adinkra motifs, I transform these culturally significant elements into a visual language that challenges traditional boundaries and redefines ceramic art on an international stage. By navigating the intersections of form, symbolism, and materiality, my practice interrogates the tensions between tradition and modernity, cultural preservation and innovation, as well as the dynamic exchanges that occur within and across cultures.

At its core, my research delves into the concept of space—both physical and metaphysical—as a lens for exploring transitions through borders, identities, and emotional terrains. My work functions as a monumental visual diary, chronicling experiences of navigating spaces that evoke a spectrum of emotions: loss, belonging, acceptance, isolation, and nostalgia. This diary embodies the universal human experience of crossing thresholds—whether geographic, cultural, or personal—and reflects my commitment to creating art that resonates across different contexts.

Through my practice, I seek to address profound questions. For instance,
• How do the spaces we traverse shape our perceptions of identity (not as black or white, African or western, but as the self), belonging, and existence?
• In what ways do transitions impact on our mental and psychological well-being?
• How can art serve as a catalyst for community engagement, fostering social cohesion across diverse contexts?

These inquiries are not merely theoretical, they are deeply personal. My body of work reflects the transformative journey of, for instance, parenthood, examining how this space of nurturing has reshaped my understanding of care, identity, and legacy.

I aim to spark dialogue around the universality of human experience while celebrating the specificity of cultural heritage. My work transcends traditional definitions of ceramics, incorporating innovative techniques and interdisciplinary approaches to amplify its relevance within the contemporary art landscape. By blending monumental forms, evocative symbolism, and rich cultural narratives, I contribute to a global discourse on the self, resilience, and the ways in which art can be a bridge to foster understanding across borders.

As an artist-scholar, I am committed to pushing the boundaries of ceramic art, championing its role in contemporary art, and fostering a deeper appreciation of cultural intersections. My work stands as a testament to the enduring power of art to connect, challenge, and inspire.

My work is predominantly ceramic freestanding and wall sculptures and installations that incorporate fabric (notably Kente), repurposed wood, metal and several other nonceramic materials and media. They are characterized by vibrant underglazes, slips, and manganese dioxide finishes in both oxidation and atmospheric firing techniques, particularly soda firing, to create surfaces that resonate with texture and depth.

I have been fascinated by how many Ghanaian ceramic artists such as James Kwame Amoah, Kofi Asante, Frederick Okai and many others have used and continue to use Ghanaian symbolism, like Adinkra, in many fascinating ways; and how artist like Piet Mondrian, Kurt Shwitters, Joel Shapiro, Faith Ringgold and Karel Appel render abstractionism and repurposed materials. I strive to create an aura through which multiple symbols of social significance coexist within space and time in my work. I am drawn to the dominance of mostly primary colors in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. His bold and block color composition resonates with the bold and vibrant colors of the Kente. I am interested in exploring the intersection between the abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Joel Shapiro and my style abstraction.

My sculptures incorporate fabric alongside industrial materials and tools—such as pallets, worn out kiln parts (including kiln elements, thermocouples, relays, cones), used saw blades, and other remnants of labor and production. These works vary in scale, from small pieces to expansive installations, and are presented as freestanding, hanging, or wall-mounted forms. I am particularly interested in surface treatments using underglazes and manganese dioxide, which allow me to explore contrasts between material histories, process, and aesthetic finish.

Captions

• Dining with Mama & Dada: Blood, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, underglaze, 20 x 13.5 x 13.5 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Golden, 2025, porcelain, stained porcelain, underglaze, 20 x 15 x 15 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Purity #1, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, 18.5 x 13 x 11 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Purity #2, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, 22 x 13.5 x 12 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #1, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, concrete, 27.6 x 8.6 x 7.25 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #2, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, thermocouple, concrete, 27.25 x 9.5 x 8 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #3, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, concrete, 27.25 x 9.5 x 8 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Compound House, 2025, stoneware, Kente, underglaze, manganese dioxide, kiln replacement element, mixed media, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• One Man Thousand, 2024, stoneware, Kente, underglaze, mixed media, Installation variables, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• What Did You Learn Today, 2022, colored porcelain, wood, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Everything and Nothing: The Diary of the One Who Leaves, 2021, porcelain, stoneware, mixed media, 76 x 30 x 30 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Picking the Pieces Together, 2020, stoneware, underglaze, glaze, epoxy, 23 x 18 x 15 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist

Sat high above the banks of Windermere in the English Lake District, is Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, the former holiday home of the Manchester industrialist Sir Edward Holt (1849–1928). Designed by British architect and artist Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945) at the turn of the last century, the house was conceived during a period of renewed interest in artisan crafts and the handmade that countered growing mechanisation and mass production. Subsequent changes saw the family giving up the house, it being used as a school for evacuee’s during the second world war, and finally as offices. Blackwell, and its richly decorated interior showcasing the best craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts Movement both locally and from across the UK, was only saved from being a distant memory thanks to the Lakeland Arts Trust, who restored the house to allow it to be opened to the public as a period house and gallery in the early 2000s. Upon encountering Blackwell, you cannot help but be captivated by its beauty. The often watery Cumbrian light traverses through the space illuminating the interior so that your eye travels from the wonderfully carved ornamental wooden panelling to the stained glass windows, and from printed wallcoverings to ornamental plasterwork that reflect and play homage to the surrounding natural environment. The House’s orientation allows every window to frame and capture the distant fells beyond. It is a truly special location in which to celebrate creative endeavours, both historical and contemporary. It therefore seems fitting, that this architectural gem of the British Arts and Crafts Movement has become the setting for the first UK retrospective of Edinburgh-based ceramic artist Frances Priest. For over twenty five years, Priest has been exploring decorative motifs, form, and movement, creating sculptural ceramic artworks that have become widely recognised and celebrated for their reverence to ornament.

Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour brings together over 60 works of ceramics, drawings and artworks from across her making career, into the intimate and historic setting of Blackwell, allowing for a range of exchanges between the viewer and Priest’s work that is beyond a typical gallery exhibition experience. We do not encounter her work in isolation set within a minimalist white cube, but through encounters integrated into the rich interior spaces of this Arts and Crafts home. It is as if her artworks are part of the fabric of the building, or artifacts of past custodians, allowing for direct correlations between her practice and the legacy of ornamentation she celebrates. Through their placement in this Arts and Crafts tableau, we see the artist’s eye directing these encounters. Some could be easily overlooked but bring such joy upon their discovery, such as her work Shift Intersect I placed in the window well of the house’s porch. Its form echoes the movement of the stained glass flowers and birds in the panel behind, and its subtle colour nods to the slate floor you stand upon. Others directly draw our attention to decorative motifs present in both the interior and artwork, as seen in the positioning of Gathering Bowl – Collage medium situated below the printed hessian wall covering with their echoing daisy motifs in the dining room. In turn, the Cumbrian landscape beyond the windows beneath which seven of her Patterns of Flora vases sit, illuminate and create sympathetic shadowing to the botany she has stunningly illustrated upon their surfaces. Whereas her new series of works created for the White Drawing Room and named in honour of this space, nestled within the decorative integrated shelving by Baillie Scott, feel as if they are part of the original decorative gesso scheme in their delicate tracery of shared motifs of leaves and chevrons and powdery surface treatment. Elsewhere, the gallery display does not follow a specific timeline or key events but creates moments of discussion between the past and present, gallery series and public commissions.

In the case of Priest’s most widely known works, I have often described experiencing these as an encounter with an architectural sculptural memento, due to the opulently drawn and incised ornamentation that encompasses the entirety of the form, almost as if she has scooped up a mosaic or tiled surface and presented it for our delectation. Priest found inspiration in decorative pattern and ornamentation from an early age. As a child, her parents gifted her an abridged reproduction of The Grammar of Ornament by British architect, designer and design theorist Owen Jones (1809–1874) who is considered one of the most influential tastemakers of the Victorian era, due to his pioneering studies on colour theory, geometry and form. This publication came to have a profound and lifelong effect upon Priest, seeing her interpret aspects of its 100 vibrant chromolithographic plates that illustrate Jones design principles which underpinned the natural world and the architecture, textiles, manuscripts and decorative arts of nineteen diverse cultural periods throughout her artistic practice. Her journey through ornamentation has changed over time, from delicate mark making and standalone motifs, to vibrant colourful explosions of decoration. However, at the heart of her practice is her desire to capture through the process of drawing, similarly to the Grammar, the potential of creating a connection between the maker and the viewer, through our shared relationship to decoration. Drawing is always the starting point for her, be it through a pencil line or gouache paint. As with any designer or architect, Priest starts with a draft – a title which she uses for many of works on paper in the exhibition, feeling that there is “a vitality and potential in a drawing that can become anything” and through drawings there is a “direct connection to the artist’s brain”. The process of drawing is then extended to the surface of her ceramics, where she diligently incises her compositions into the body of the clay using a scalpel, tools she has fashioned herself, or impressed, moving with the body of the form allowing the motifs to glide and curl to its contours. Oxides are then often used to demarcate the drawn lines on the surface to form a boundary or outline to the colour application she will then employ, creating different harmonies along a surface, some intense and energetic, others quiet and completive.

Priest’s earliest works of ceramic art were highly influenced by her training in the late 1990s at Edinburgh College of Art, a period when form and process over surface pattern and decoration still had such power in the teaching of craft. However, even in these earliest works on display, some seen here for the first time in over 20 years thanks to the generosity but also a testament to the relationship Priest has garnered with her private collectors, we can find her intent to explore the possibility and the energy of surface decoration even through the subtlest of applications. For example, what seems at first glance as an energetic flourish of an arm drawing a line between the two interconnecting monumental forms of Broken Ellipse Series I, on closer inspection reveals itself to be a series of overlaid ovoid’s encircling the two forms that complete as you move around the sculpture and shift your perspective. Close by in the upper gallery, where we see the Curator’s collective exploration of Priests oeuvre over the 25 years, there is another early work from 2005 – Shifting Grid, juxtaposed cleverly with a series of drawings from her 2024 series Unfixing. These drawings mark a shift away from the full immersive exploration of ornamentation that was her raison d’être at this stage, to motifs that drifted across surfaces as if blown there by some unseen force or loosened from containment. Collectively in this placement of ceramic and set of gouache drawings by the curator, we see clearly the symbiosis of Priest’s practice. One has led to the other, not just through time – the drawings could easily have led to the ceramic, but in the very act of her interpreting motifs and pattern.

Within both the house and the gallery context there are a plethora of examples of Priest’s signature adoration to ornament, namely her ceramic artworks whose entire form is joyfully covered in pattern and colour. The desire to explore ornament and decoration in a more exuberant way by Priest revealed itself following a residency in Southeast Asia in the mid 2000’s. The influence of, and reverence to decoration by the communities and countries she travelled through encouraged her to throw off the constraints of European modernist orthodoxies, and to reexamine her early love of The Grammar of Ornament. These works, often titled in honour of the source material, do not replicate the Victorian codex, but are a starting off point where she melds motifs from it with those she encountered during her travels and through source materials held in museums like my own. Some are constrained by the boundaries of the form wrapping it completely in her compositions which we see in Vase Form, Grammar of Ornament, Byzantine No3 Colour, others as with The Grammar of Ornament India iii are edged as if the piece has been created from a mosaic of motifs. Both not only draw the eye, but a desire to touch and interact, to trace the patterns in which she explores.

Interaction and emotional response to decoration have come to be an important part of Priest’s practice, not only in how she engages and interprets the decorative, but also how she encourages others to do so through her works. Often collaborating with other makers and organisations, Priest has often gone beyond the vessel form to achieve this in the public sphere. The award winning Tiled Corridor – a section of which is reproduced in the gallery space – that was commissioned by the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for its new centre specialising in mental health, and created in collaboration with Craven Dunhill Jackfield, one of the last manufacturers in the UK specialising in traditional hand-made decorative ceramic tiles; references the ceramic walls of the local Victorian tenements familiar to many of the residents and staff. This vibrant tactile artwork cultivates an emotional connection, creating a sense of comfort and familiarity to an otherwise austere environment in its unveiling in 2018. Another example showcased in the exhibition is the digital animation Imbrication from 2022 – sat in the far gallery space in Blackwell – which was originally commissioned by New Media Scotland for the Stepping in Screen at Music Hall Aberdeen, as a collaboration between Priest and digital artist Sam Healy. This venture into the digital sees Priest’s illustrative motifs inspired by the neo-classical architecture of the venue, encoded into an algorithm by Healy creating a mesmerising sequence that shifts and dances before your eyes, never repeating the same pattern twice, in what can easily be described as a living wallpaper.

The strength and success of both Priest’s artworks and commissions is that in their historical connection to design and decorative arts, she cultivates reassuring and familiar yet stimulating emotional encounters for all. Thus, by exhibiting her work in an environment such as Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, we are encouraged to consider that the ethos of the movement in which it was designed and built is not only alive and strong, but that Priest should rightly be considered as part of a lineage of artists, makers and designers who have visually stimulated and enriched our lives.

Sarah Rothwell is the Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Design, in the Department of Global Arts, Cultures and Design at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh. Here, she has collection responsibility for the British and European glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery and industrial design collections circa 1945-present. She supports the sector through her position on the Board of Craft Scotland and the Council of the Society of Jewellery Historians. In addition, she has written on Priest’s practice in her paper Capturing Decorative Art – The work of Frances Priest, Journal of the Decorative Arts Society No. 45.

Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour is on view between November 7, 2025, and April 11, 2026, at Blackwell – the Arts & Crafts house in Bowness-on-Windermere, United Kingdom. Blackwell is part of Lakeland Arts.

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Captions

• Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour, Exhibition installation at Blackwell – the Arts & Crafts house. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 1) White Drawing Room Collection | Chevron 1 & 4, 2025, Hand built ceramic with inscribed line and vitreous slip. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 2) Vase Form, Byzantine VIII, 2023, Ceramic form, inscribed line, earthenware glaze and vitreous slip. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 3) Drum Form | Chevron / Stripe / Asanoha, 2019, Inscribed ceramic with vitreous slip, glaze and hand-drawn enamel decals. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 4) Gathering Bowl: Grammar of Ornament: India I, 2017, Inscribed ceramics with vitreous slip glaze. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 5) Shifting Grid, 2005, Hand built ceramic with oxide inlay and vitreous slip. On loan from Susan Rice. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 6) The Grammar of Ornament India III, 2018, Press moulded and carved ceramic with incised hand drawing, blue oxide wash, vitreous slip and earthenware glaze. On loan from National Museums Scotland. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 7) Gathering Bowl – Collage medium, 2013, Press moulded and carved ceramic with incised hand drawing, hand painted glaze and enamel transfer. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 8) Vase Form, Grammar of Ornament, Byzantine No3 Colour, 2020, Hand built ceramic form, inscribed line, earthenware glaze and vitreous slip. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 9) Patterns of Flora – 7 parian vases, 2015, Slip case parian with enamel transfer. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler