Body Vessel Clay

Our 10th annual exhibition, Two Temple Place showcases the ceramic medium through artworks by three generations of Black women artists working in clay. Touring in summer 2022 to York Art Gallery.

Body Vessel Clay spans 70 years of ceramics, celebrating the medium in new and surprising ways. Beginning with the seminal Nigerian potter, Ladi Kwali, and examining her interaction with 1950s British Studio Pottery, this important new exhibition brings together a rich history with experimental new works by Black women working with clay today.

Through Kwali and her female contemporaries, this new perspective on one of the world’s oldest artforms will reinterpret the line of Kwali’s influence and its resonance on a younger generation of international contemporary women artists working with clay in radical new ways. Artists celebrated in the exhibition include Magdalene Odundo DBE, who worked with Kwali, through Bisila Noha, looking both backwards and forwards, and into a striking contemporary display from Phoebe Collings-James, Shawanda Corbett, Chinasa Vivian Ezhuga, Jade Montserrat and Julia Phillips.

Curated by Jareh Das.