Narratives In Clay at County Hall Pottery: A Spoonful of Sugar

By Unu Sohn

The black dog of depression, peace doves, a house on fire are all symbols you can find upon visiting the exhibition Narratives In Clay at County Hall Pottery, on view from January 28 through March 9, 2025. This group show features a collection of sculptures and vases by Eun-ha Paek, Katy Stubbs, Kaye Blegvad, Isabel Greenberg, Charlie Duck, and Benjamin Phillips. It is immediately evident that although all works are ceramic, each of these artists has a strong practice based in animation, illustration, and drawing. The installation layout consists of wall-based works and thirteen simple table constructions, each made of four sheets of wood, some of which are painted blue. The works by a single artist are displayed individually, clustered on their own island in the gallery.

Starting at the back wall of the space, there are three melancholic and dreamy tile murals of muted, earthy glazes. In the first artwork, a figure lies prone atop a mysterious large box of practically the same size, and their long hair flows down its side. The person is in a field of giant flowers that would reach their waist, and the blue sky is filled with clouds. I also love to daydream under the heavens. Except in this case, the person’s body is rigid and not at all like the languid pose you would find me in. The stance and the expressionless face make me wonder if the beautifully ornate box is a coffin, despite its unconventionally tall height. This work, titled Practical Muscles, is by the artist Charlie Duck.

Duck somehow knows about the key I lost in Lincoln Park when I lived in Chicago. A close-up of my key under a dark night sky, nestled near some flowers and a dragonfly, is portrayed in another one of his tile murals. I would often go see the sunset along the coast of Lake Michigan that neighbored the city and one time, I arrived back at my apartment block to find my key missing. Duck tells this story and other specific yet universal tales in his practice. Although I resonate most with his tableaux, I cannot manage to take photos that do them justice. I settle for posting shots of work by other artists to my Instagram stories instead. I am exasperated but also appreciate any and every reminder that art must be seen in person.

Across the room and at the entrance of the gallery is a shelf containing sixteen small sculptures by Eun-ha Paek. Paek is a Korean artist based in New York. Her animation films have been screened at the Guggenheim Museum and Sundance Film Festival. Her ceramic resume is equally impressive, with residencies at EKWC, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Archie Bray Foundation, and solo shows at Nuclear Portland and Hostler Burrows. There is no doubt that the scale of her works here are a consequence of the fact that she is the only international artist featured in Narratives In Clay. While each piece could fit within your hand, the works successfully reflect the technical skills employed in her wider practice. For example, there are 3D printed components playing up “drooloops” that characterize the tool.

Paek employs the same recognizable character in each sculpture: a cheeky figure with three or four sets of buns for hair. This playful Despicable Me minion-like character emphasizes the humor in Paek’s practice and complements elements such as bleeding cobalt designs (I laughed with pure glee at the vases using this technique for portraits of her little character) and an imitation marble glaze. Often featured in pairs, they are like court jesters performing in a way that feels both vain and deeply relatable.

There are other pairs found in the gallery. Some of Kaye Blegvad’s works consist of Staffordshire dogs. By referring to this British ceramic classic, her work evokes the kitsch figurines historically found on the mantle. Creative Director Emma Payne told me that the mantlepiece is a theme of this exhibition and informed the install.

Some of the pairs in Blegvad’s artwork on view are not twins but rather a Staffordshire and its pup, or a cat and her kittens. Alongside Isabel Greenberg’s depictions of motherhood, Blegvad’s creatures take on an anthropomorphic quality. This is further evident in her sculptures featuring animals fighting. In one work, a black dog lies directly atop a prostrate human figure with its mouth right around the person’s face. The work represents the metaphor of depression as a black dog used in the UK. Another one of Blegvad’s black dogs is attacked by doves, a symbol of peace. There are also diving doves, upside-down in other words, that read like a Tarot card reversal. In Tarot, an inverted card indicates something subconscious or perhaps of a challenging nature. Like a Tarot deck, Blegvad’s body of work is teeming with possible timelines in which the same character may show up as friend or foe.

Katy Stubb’s vases present other ambiguous scenes. There is a cinematic quality to her images, as though we have walked into a movie screening too late, long after the advertisements and trailers have finished. In one such shot, a car is flying in mid-air and the angle of the exhaust smoke that trails behind it reflects the slope of the mountain below. It is unclear whether this is a symbol of freedom or disaster. Her work in Narratives In Clay exclusively consists of terracotta vases with black slip. Like Blegvad, Stubbs references ceramic craft history but this time from Greece rather than the UK. Her vases are a contemporary of Athenian red-figure pottery in which the background is painted black and the foreground details are left in the exposed raw, red terracotta.

Benjamin Phillips depicts people waiting, dancing, boxing, queuing, and fighting on the surface of his vases in this show. He has exhibited his ceramics as part of London Design Festival (2022) and The Other Art Fair (2019). Phillips is an accomplished illustrator, and his work for the graphic novel Alte Zachen, written by Ziggy Hanaor, won the category of Illustration for Children and Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year in the 2024 V&A Illustration Awards. What is the value of making the 2D three-dimensional? One of Phillips’ sculptures is a large head with drawings of various scenes: a caged bird, an officer checking people entering a building, a bong, someone playing pool in a hospital. I walk around Phillips’ object, experiencing its thingness and presence. It feels existential, like it is asking viewers, “What makes a man himself and not somebody else?”

Isabel Greenberg is an illustrator like Phillips and particularly stands out as an unusual choice to feature in a ceramics exhibition as she is a known graphic novelist and illustrator. Her novel ‘The One Hundred Nights of Hero’ will be adapted into a film featuring stars Nicholas Galitzine, Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, and Charli XCX. While she has previously dabbled in clay, her artworks here were all made on-site specifically for the show. Studio Director Alex Simpson curated the exhibition and invited Greenberg, whom Simpson met while they were both enrolled in the University of Brighton BA program in Illustration.

Narratives in Clay, 27 January – 9 March 2025, County Hall Pottery, London, UK

Greenberg’s work in this exhibition includes wall-based terracotta slabs featuring mythological creatures and people in medieval-style garb. She also has table sculptures of earthenware cribs and bellies as vessels that emphasize motifs of motherhood. She uses slip with carving and sgraffito techniques to create her imagery. According to Creative Director Payne, Greenberg enjoys the immediacy of clay. She does not need to scan in images, modify the color, work with the printing company, and so on. In contrast with Greenberg’s experience of the publishing industry, clay provides agency. Nobody introduce her to glaze chemistry—that will swipe away the nice hold on ceramics that slips and stains provide.

The strength of this exhibition is in the storytelling of each artist’s body of work, and Narratives In Clay activates my inner child. It feels like watching Saturday morning cartoons that I chuckle along to as the creators furtively address bleak and poetic subjects. The works use humor to process emotions like loneliness or gloom, as well as experiences like motherhood or memories of a caged bird. We are all just coping, and sometimes humor is how you manage. I once fainted during a visit to a hospital clinic. I felt dizzy and light-headed, so I stopped to grab the wall in front of me. As I fell to the ground and everything faded to black, I did not feel panic. In an absurd attempt to manage the possibly dangerous situation, I found myself smiling and thinking, “It’s like the movies. How dramatic.”

Unu Sohn is an artist and ceramicist based in London. She holds a master’s degree in ceramics from the Royal College of Art.

Narratives In Clay was on view at County Hall Pottery, London, between January 28 and March 9, 2025. View a photo gallery here.

County Hall Pottery houses a gallery and studio space with classes open to the public. It also features a gas kiln, unique for a central London studio located only minutes away from the London Eye. Their upcoming show titled Edgelands will be on view from March 17 to May 4, 2025. Curated by local collective haptic/tacit, it will feature its members Kim Norton, Jane Cairns, and Grant Aston alongside Rebecca Appleby, Hilary Mayo, and Ella Porter.

Subscribe to Ceramics Now to read similar articles, essays, reviews and critical reflections on contemporary ceramics. Subscriptions help us feature a wider range of voices, perspectives, and expertise in the ceramics community.