The Wondrously Defiant Art of Contemporary Ceramics
Olivia McEwan, Hyperallergic
January 2023
Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art is a bold move by the Hayward Gallery: many will remember the shock at Grayson Perry’s Turner Prize win in 2003, entering the (then) most cutting edge contemporary competition with this most underused, humble medium. And yet of the 23 international artists on view, he and the show’s other best known ceramicist, Edmund de Waal, are arguably the least compelling — demonstrating that curator Dr. Cliff Lauson has gone all out for high visual impact in his other selection. He’s brought together artists from all over the globe and works that span a range of topics, from “architecture to social justice, the body, the domestic, the political and the organic,” according to its press release. How, then, from a curatorial perspective, can the show make cohesive sense, for the audience to better grasp the discipline and its recent history? The answer is, through pieces so proudly disparate, tactile, and wondrously defiant of categorization that it doesn’t matter. Instead, an introductory caption declares the unifying theme of the artists’ “[shared passion] for the intensely tactile, physical processes of shaping and working with clay.” The Hayward Gallery itself is blessed with unforgiving, brutalist concrete spaces that lend themselves to large-scale, unconventional installations; its monotone gray and hard surfaces provide an excellent setting for the exhibition’s otherworldly, sometimes exploding forms, and it makes for an exciting visit indeed […]