Ceramics Unbound
Ceramics Unbound
Ceramics Unbound is a standing exhibition at Affordable Art Fair Hampstead. Twenty-seven ceramicists, curated by Caroline Jackman, given a space of their own every year the fair runs.
We wanted a piece of programming that was more than a one-off, something with continuity, something that could become synonymous with the Hampstead fair. A section that returns, that grows a reputation of its own, that becomes part of how people describe the fair. Not a spotlight that flicks on and off. A fixture.
Ceramics rarely gets this kind of room. The medium can sit in the shadow of painting and 2D work at fairs like ours, treated as craft first, art second. Ceramics Unbound exists to correct that. The timing helps too: the show runs alongside Ceramic Art London, a leading ceramics fair at Olympia, so for one stretch of the year the whole city turns its attention to clay.
There's a practical side to it as well. Not everyone has the wall space for a painting, but almost everyone has a shelf, a windowsill, a side table. Ceramics gives people a way into collecting that doesn't ask for a bare wall first. And it scratches that itch to keep collecting, even after the logical part of your brain has told you there's no wall space left.
Caroline built the show to work against the obvious image of ceramics: the bowl, the vase, the useful object. She looked for artists who treat clay as a material for ideas first. Some of the twenty-seven work with landscape and memory. Some with the body, with grief, with queer history. Some with AI, sitting old technique and new questions in the same piece. The range is the point. Walk the stand and the definition of "ceramic art" stops holding still.
Artists
The exhibition includes work from Adele Howitt, Agalis Manessi, Alison Rees, Caroline Egleston, Chloe Lennon, Christopher Turrell, Elaine Sheppard-Bolt, Emily Gibbard, Georgia Weston, Hanna Salomonsson, Helen Johannessen, Ikuko Iwamoto, Jane Preston, Jim Gladwin, Karen Thompson, Kaytea Budd-Brophy, Kirsty Adams, Kyra Cane, Liudmila Krutikova, Mella Shaw, Oriel Zinaburg, Patricia Small, Sara Dodd, Steve Dixon, Tina Vlassopoulos, Uriel Caspi, and Ying Zheng.
Caroline calls it a show about clay's evolving language. I call it the section that's going to define the Hampstead fair for years to come.
Digital Catalogue: here
