Shared Material is on view at &Gallery, Edinburgh
June 6 – July 1, 2026
Exhibiting artists: A-S Rope, Dan Kelly, Derek Wilson, Frances Priest, Jane Cairns, Lorraine Robson, Matthew Chambers, Nicholas Lees, Rebecca Appleby, Roger Coll, Steven Edwards
&Gallery is delighted to announce our debut ceramics exhibition, Shared Material. Bringing together a dynamic group of practitioners, the exhibition introduces seven artists exhibiting with the gallery for the first time, alongside gallery artists Derek Wilson, Frances Priest, Lorraine Robson and Rebecca Appleby.
Showcasing contemporary sculptural approaches to ceramics, the exhibition features eleven artists working across the UK and Europe. Using clay as a shared point of departure, the exhibition highlights the diversity of approaches, forms and ideas that emerge through individual practices. While united by material, the works reveal distinct sensibilities, ranging from precise and architectural to expressive and intuitive, demonstrating the breadth of contemporary ceramic practice. The exhibition will showcase both wall and plinth based ceramic pieces.
Across the exhibition, the familiar language of ceramics, including throwing, hand building, and slip casting, is reconfigured as a means of sculptural enquiry. Long associated with function and tradition, clay is extended here into a more experimental and exploratory field.
For many of the artists, the vessel operates as both a point of origin and a structure to be tested. Forms are cut, stretched, repeated or destabilised, shifting from contained objects into spatial constructions that engage with architecture and balance. Elsewhere, process remains visible: gestures are preserved in the surface, and the material records acts of making through seams, joins and traces of touch.
Surface becomes a key area of focus. In some works, it is restrained and tonal, emphasising volume and proportion; in others, it is activated through pattern, line and colour, where clay functions as a ground for drawing and ornament. These approaches demonstrate how meaning is shaped not only through form, but through how each piece is finished, interrupted or left open.
A shared attention to systems and repetition runs throughout the exhibition, whether through the logic of the wheel, modular construction or incremental variation. This is often offset by moments of disruption: asymmetry, collapse or intuitive intervention. The works move between control and contingency, reflecting the tension between intention and material behaviour.
Rather than presenting a single position, the exhibition brings together distinct but interconnected practices. Collectively, they map a field in which ceramics operates as an expanded discipline, moving between sculpture and object, structure and gesture, and precision and variation.
Seen in this way, clay emerges not simply as a medium, but as an active collaborator: a material that resists, records and ultimately shapes the forms it becomes.
Contact
info@andgallery.co.uk
&Gallery
3 Dundas Street
Edinburgh, EH3 6QG 0131
United Kingdom
Photos courtesy of the gallery
