Five contemporary artists working with clay today (2024)

Camden Arts Centre has a history with ceramics: since opening in 1965, the Centre has dedicated a space for artists and visitors to work with clay. More recently, emerging artists working in ceramics have undertaken fellowships, using their time in the Ceramics Studio as a period of research and experimentation. The fellowship entered a new stage in 2017 with support from the Freelands Foundation, offering three six-month artist residencies with an exhibition the following year. The first recipient of the prize, Jonathan Baldock, will continue his residency until March 2018.

A new publication Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2017) brings together over 100 contemporary artists working with clay today. With contributions from leading international writers and curators, Vitamin C highlights the diverse ways in which artists today are experimenting with the medium. Ahead of the launch of Vitamin C at Camden Arts Centre, we focus on five artists and their different approaches to clay.

Phoebe Cummings

Phoebe Cummings works exclusively with clay in its raw form, creating transitory sculptures and installations which gradually change over time. Often large in scale and site-responsive, her works consider the performative qualities of clay.

Cummings produces intricate, detailed works which draw on representations of nature within art history, rather than scientific accuracy. During her 2010 residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum, she developed an installation based on natural forms found in printed and painted patterns from the museum collection. As part of her Camden Arts Centre Ceramics Fellowship in 2013, Cummings created a temporary work in the garden exploring the natural formation of clay through the weathering of rocks.

Cummings’ work references the inherent natural properties of clay, and the natural cycle of life and death. After an exhibition is over, the wet clay she has delicately configured into decorative forms is then returned to its amorphous state, to be used again for a new work. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Woman’s Hour Craft Prize for her unique approach to working with clay.

Emma Hart

Emma Hart makes work that captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday life. With a background in photography, she has described her introduction to ceramics as a turning point in her practice. For Hart, the messy physicality of clay is a way of bringing the chaos of the outside world into the gallery space.

Ceramics are just one element of Hart’s multidisciplinary installations, which also combine film, photography and sound. Like stage sets, they invite the audience to explore and uncover narratives. In her 2013 exhibition Dirty Looks at Camden Arts Centre, Hart drew on her experience of working in a call centre in her twenties by transforming the gallery into a disjointed office environment. Pink ceramic tongues hung from glazed clay clipboards and wonky chipboard drawers, while speakers hid inside sculptures, shouting, stuttering and interrupting the space.

In 2015, Hart won the MaxMara Art Prize in partnership with Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti. As part of her prize, she was awarded a six-month residency in Italy which she spent partially in Faenza, drawing inspiration from the artisans of the city renowned for its ceramic history. The resulting installation, exhibited both in London and Reggio Emilia, saw Hart continue her interest in ceramics to portray the psychology of personal relationships.

The Grantchester Pottery

In 2011 artists Phil Root and Giles Round met at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire, while each were on a residency. There they founded The Grantchester Pottery, a collaborative project experimenting with diverse ways of working with other artists and makers. Inspired by historical models such as Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop — for which Fry commissioned the Bloomsbury Group to make works anonymously under the same imprint — The Grantchester Pottery enlists makers, artists, writers, photographers and recently their ikebana teacher to collectively create works. One Grantchester Pottery ceramic can be designed, produced and shaped by many different hands, removing any sense of individual authorship. The Grantchester Pottery can also be regarded as a ‘meta-structure’ and an artwork in its own right.

In an era of mass-production, The Grantchester Pottery places importance on the object and the process of making. Their functional and decorative ceramic objects are all handmade, and considerable attention is given to the individual stages of production: the handling of the clay, and the choice of form, colour palette and glazing.

Alongside their Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Arts Centre in 2015–16, The Grantchester Pottery staged a series of events and open studios, focusing on the idea of collaborative working and blurring the lines between fine art and design.

Caroline Achaintre

With a background as a blacksmith, Caroline Achaintre works with materials as diverse as paper, leather, textiles and ceramics. She first began experimenting with clay in 2009 after taking an evening class, and continues to incorporate it into her practice. Her interest in clay came out of a frustration with the fragility of her paper sculptures: for Achaintre, clay offers a more long-lasting solution to her existing work.

Achaintre cites influences as broad as German Expressionism, popular culture and the carnival — creating theatrical, humorous and absurdist works which hover between figuration and abstraction. Her pieces often incorporate anthropomorphic features, and masks — whether rendered in leather, tufts or ceramic — are a recurring motif.

Modes of display are important to Achaintre, creating a dialogue between the works and the exhibition space. She has described her ceramic objects as ‘characters’, interacting with one another in their habitats. For her Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Arts Centre in 2014, she hosted an open studio, displaying the works-in-progress from the residency grouped together on special plinths and purpose built decorative furniture.

Achaintre is inspired by the use of clay in ancient cultures and has been invited by the Museo del Alabado in Quito, Ecuador to respond to their collection. She is interested in the Valdivian Sculptures made from clay and stone between 3000–1500 BC, describing them as both ancient and futurist at the same time — much like clay itself.

Salvatore Arancio

In his installation Fashioned to a Device behind a Tree, Salvatore Arancio staged a garden of strange and familiar sculptural ceramics in Camden Arts Centre’s Artists’ Studio to culminate his 2015 residency. At once resembling vegetal forms and alien objects, the sculptures were brought to life through a series of performance.

Arancio is interested in the aesthetics of the natural world and its psychedelic and primordial connections. Through clay, he translates his close observations of geological and environmental phenomena into sculptures which are reminiscent of occultist and sci-fi artefacts.

A new outdoor sculpture by Arancio was featured in Viva Arte Viva, the curated section of the 2017 Venice Biennale. The glazed ceramic was based on a 2015 performance commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery, in which Arancio hosted a group hypnotherapy session re-enacted from a YouTube video. The Venice sculpture, It Was Only a Matter of Time Before We Found the Pyramid and Forced It Open, was created under the influence of hypnotherapy and was conceived to resemble a ‘healing area’ for visitors to the Biennale.

With a background in photography, Arancio has remarked how working with clay is a liberating experience. Working with a natural material, and the unpredictability and the alchemy of the glazing and firing process is an antidote to the slick detachment of the digital age.

Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2017) will be launched at Camden Arts Centre on Wednesday 15 November 2017.