Clare Twomey, Phoebe Cummings, Cristiano Di Martino and Davinia-Ann Robinson, will discuss their use of unfired clay and its potential in their respective practices. By considering the fragility, vulnerability and impermanence of the medium, they will explore themes of transience and natural process, and the way the clay’s malleability and fluidity engender an immediacy of connection.

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For A Moment | For A lifetime by Clare Twomey

This talk will centre on the nature of clay works that are temporary and unstable. I will discuss projects that interrogate scale, materiality, and site. From a liquid clay waterfall in a palace to my recent work in the studio. There are generations of knowledge at play in these works made in ceramic factories that celebrate human skill, material challenge and contemporary thinking. These works raise challenges to the perception of clay as a static material. The main work in discussion will be a new work in the studio titled For A Moment | For A lifetime. This work is comprised of temporary porcelain chalk drawings which claim lost spaces and create momentary spaces to occupy with care and resistance. The spaces claimed by drawing are those of remembered places of joy and safety, places recalled to enrich present lives.  The recalling of landscapes and places from previous or hoped resting points serves as a way to transfer and share knowledges of place and self. The drawings made are not to be kept, they are washed away to make way for others, it is the act of drawing and remembering that stays with us, the intimate act of tracing with our hands what resides in memory. Landscape is both personal and ecological, it is both shared and private. In the act of drawing and sharing this with others a collective memory is formed, this does not reimagine alone but together.

Clare Twomey is a British artist, researcher, and curator (b. 1968) Lives and works in London, UK. Twomey is among the most groundbreaking and influential ceramic artists of her generation, Clare Twomey is a defining figure of the ‘expanded field’ of ceramics. Her practice encompasses site-specific installation and performance; she frequently collaborates with institutions, and embraces audience participation and temporality. This artist lead exploration is located in the area of art, ceramics and crafts practices in museum and contemporary art institutions, making original and significant contributions to knowledge in the field.

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Phoebe Cummings studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has undertaken a number of artist residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including a three-month Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Co. factory, Wisconsin (2008) and six months as ceramics artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2010). Cummings was selected as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011. Exhibitions have included a commission for Swept Away at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2012) and a solo show at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu (2013). She was awarded the second ceramics fellowship at Camden Arts Centre, London (2012 – 2013) was the inaugural winner of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize and was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Awards 2018. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Brighton in 2019 and is Research Associate at the Ceramics Research Centre – UK, University of Westminster.

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Unfinished, unfired, unfixed by Cristiano di Martino

In this talk, I’ll be diving into the making of a recent installation that marked a real shift in my practice. Working in situ with 600 kg of unfired clay over two weeks, I created three large, extruded sculptures, surrounded by hand-built elements. They were always meant to live only for the duration of the show, to decay, collapse, and be recycled. It was about fragility and impermanence.
Laying theatrical forms arranged like a triptych, echoing myth, religion, and a chapel-like space… bodies caught in transition, laid bare between dying and mutating, resembling both machine and corpses that no longer belongs to nature.
This work helped me to begin stripping away excessive refinement. I realised I’d been missing the trauma, the ambiguity, the fracture. These pieces weren’t sealed or finished but they remained raw and exposed. I let the surface crack, mold, fail. A return to something primal, nature as something that claims you. On the walls, four fired ceramics acted like organs searching for a body, while the space itself became that body. Working at that scale with unfired clay felt both physically demanding and strangely intimate. Its fleshy, bodily texture, its reconciling, regenerative nature echoed the body returning to the earth. There was something in that vulnerability, in that undoing, that allowed the work, and me, to shift.

Cristiano Di Martino was born in Naples, Italy. He is a London-based artist, whose sculptural practice explores the fractured relationship between the body, nature, and failed ritual systems. He graduated in Painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 2009 and has exhibited widely across the UK and Italy. Recent exhibitions include Spillâge (Standpoint Gallery, London, 2025), Dialogo delle Rocce (Nuovo Spazio di Casso, Italy, 2024), The Way of All Flesh (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024), and In the Darkness of Bones (St. Chads Project, London, 2024). In the same year, he was awarded the DYCP by Arts Council England.

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Mud Motherspeaks by Davinia-Ann Robinson

Davinia-Ann will share her practice and knowledge by discussing clay through the various stages of the clay body’s malleability, as well as through an analysis of different rituals and practices. She will show how her work explores both the individual and collective body, as well as the body of the clay, and ideas of ancestral liberation. Using raw clay, extracted in London from varied sites, her work approaches the material through an under-explored practice of reciprocal partnerships between the body and clay as collaborators in an attempt to undo racial trauma and provide healing conduits. In its original form, the clay is unmalleable, necessitating the removing of debris: sand and stones, soaking the clay body in water, and burying hands in both the clay body and water to create clay slip. In an effort to ‘become undisciplined’ and in search of ‘new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery’, her new body of work and research methodologies with clay seek to be a catalyst for ‘blackened knowledge,’ within pre-colonial and Creole spiritual practices.

Davinia-Ann Robinson holds a BA (Goldsmiths College, London,2010), and an MFA (The Slade School of Art, London, 2021). She was one of the Stanley Picker Gallery Fellows in Art and Design 2023. Her recent exhibitions include Fugitive Seeds, CCA Derry Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2022); Raw Nerves, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2022); distinction between felt flesh – San Mei Gallery, London (2022); some intimacy, (a mediation), Rotten TV, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2022); Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool (2022); Metabolic time / Am meitibileach, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2022); connections unplugged, bodies rewired – das weisse haus, Vienna (2021); Our Other Us, Art Encounters Biennial, Romania (2021); New Contemporaries, Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery, London (2021); Being Here, Kupfer, London (2021); I Am Unsure As To If It Is Still Alive, Quench, Margate (2021); Tactile Belonging, Mimosa House, London (2021); Freedom Is Outside the Skin, Kunsthal 44Møen, Denmark (2020).
Davinia lives and works in London. She is an artist of Afro-Caribbean
and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance examining how tactility, presencing and fugitivity work to form an undoing of colonial and imperial frameworks of extraction, within nature and Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies.