Feet of Clay: Contemporary Ceramics

Clay plays an integral part in origin myths all over the world. Some of the artworks in this exhibition, all of which are new, are inspired by the cultures of humans, others by non-humans, and include recycled materials and living organisms as well as clay itself.

Artists: Attua Aparicio Torinos, Saelia Aparicio, Simon Bayliss, Brickfield, Phoebe Collings-James, Rosanna Martin

Clay plays an integral part in origin myths all over the world. Its tactility offers its own explanation for this: when wet, it is soft as flesh; when dried, it is as hard or as brittle as bones. It can survive intact for hundreds and thousands of years, recording the skills of potters, the development of technologies, and the organisation of societies.

Human desire has extracted it from the ground, and with the growth of global distribution networks it has found its way into tiles, paper, pills, paint, insulation, toothpaste…. The uses that clay has been put to have shaped landscapes, including Cornwall’s clay country, where deep valleys have been quarried and high mountains of waste have been constructed by humans and machines.

As we begin to make more direct connections between the causes and effects of human interactions with materials and the ecologies that produced them, clay offers a direct route to consider the removal of so much matter from Cornwall and its displacement across the planet. The artists in this exhibition are making new work that meditates on the tension between the negative spaces of mines and quarries and the positive act of creating that is made possible as a result of this displacement.