Jareh Das, curator of ‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’, discusses the forthcoming U.S. debut at the Ford Foundation Gallery and the living matrilineal traditions of clay shaped by Black women over generations.
William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay) (United Kingdom, 1910-2001), Photograph of Ladi Kwali at a pottery demonstration in England, c.1970s. Photograph (color). Dimensions variable. Courtesy of York Museum Trust. The W.A. Ismay Bequest, 2001. Photo W.A. Ismay, © York Museums Trust.
‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’ brings together three generations of Black women artists whose work with clay spans continents, decades, and forms—rooted in a lineage shaped by Nigerian potter Ladi Kwali. Curated by Jareh Das, the exhibition celebrates Kwali’s mastery of the Gbari hand-building tradition and her enduring influence on contemporary practice, featuring artists including Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Anina Major, and Phoebe Collings-James. With over fifty works encompassing ceramics, photography, film, and archival material, the show explores clay as a medium and metaphor for memory, lineage, resistance, and transformation. Following acclaimed presentations in London and York, this U.S. debut coincides with the centenary of Kwali’s birth, offering a sharper focus on her matrilineal knowledge and global impact. In this interview, Das shares her curatorial vision for bridging past and present, creating connections across geographies, and centring forms of expertise often excluded from the ceramic canon.
Stephan Rheeder: ‘Body Vessel Clay’ brings together generations of Black women artists working in clay. What first drew you to this lineage, and why did you choose to focus on clay as a medium?
Jareh Das: Over a decade ago, I worked as a Curatorial Fellow at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, in the north of England. Within the museum’s ceramics collection was a group of Abuja pottery objects. At the time, I had never heard of Michael Cardew or his teacher, Bernard Leach. Although I recognised the name Ladi Kwali from my childhood in Lagos, I had no awareness of her connection to British studio pottery, particularly through Cardew’s extended time in Nigeria between the 1950s and 1970s. During this period, he established the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja (now renamed the Ladi Kwali Pottery Centre), where he met and trained Kwali in modern ceramic techniques.
This history was never made explicit to me. There was little emphasis on Nigerian art history education in my context. Learning about Ladi Kwali was revelatory. The fact that she was celebrated both locally and internationally, and that her work contributed to a moment of global visibility through her encounter with Cardew, was remarkable. Yet what struck me most was how little attention had been paid to the centuries-old Gbari pottery traditions she inherited and carried forward. Her legacy far predates that encounter and continues to influence generations of ceramicists and artists working with clay, particularly Black women.
Ladi Kwali’s legacy is profound and deserves far wider recognition. That is what initially drew me to her story. Clay and ceramics have existed for millennia, and I am deeply invested in how they continue to be remade, reimagined, and how their histories intersect with contemporary art and matrilineal knowledge.
Ladi Kwali (Nigeria, 1925-1984), Unglazed pot from Farnham demonstration, 1962. Earthenware, 14 ⅜ x 12 ⅝ inches. Courtesy of BA(Hons) Ceramics Course Collection. From the collections of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. UCA Ceramics Collection. UCA 2011.16. Image courtesy of Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts.
The exhibition begins with a tribute to the legacy of Ladi Kwali. How did her influence shape the curatorial framework, and what new understandings of her practice did you want to foreground?
Ladi Kwali grounds this exhibition through her use of the Gbari hand-building method, particularly the coiling technique. Coiling is a ceramic practice found across many cultures on the African continent and worldwide, with a long and rich history. It involves rolling long, rope-like coils of clay and stacking them to form vessels. The technique is highly adaptable, allowing for varied shapes and sizes, and can be carried out with or without a wheel. Coils may be smoothed for a seamless finish or left exposed to emphasise texture, rhythm, and process.
One of the new understandings I wanted to foreground is how Kwali’s practice is often framed solely through her association with Michael Cardew and the Pottery Training Centre, but what is less discussed is the way she carried deep, ancestral knowledge into that space. Her hand-building skills were not learned there; they were inherited through a matrilineal line of Gbari women potters. By placing coiling at the heart of this exhibition, I aim to highlight Kwali’s authority as an artist grounded in Indigenous traditions, someone who transformed what she already knew and adapted it in a modern studio context without compromising its origin.
Kwali’s influence is visible in the work of artists who followed her directly, such as Asibi Ido and Halima Audu, who joined the Pottery Centre after her. It is also evident in the work of Magdalene Odundo, who spent two months learning coiling and hand-building techniques from Kwali and other Gbari women potters. Her legacy continues in the practices of contemporary artists such as Phoebe Collings-James, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Simone Leigh, and Bisila Noha.
Magdalene Odundo (Kenya, 1950, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Symmetrical Reduced Black Narrow-Necked Tall Piece, 1990. Terracotta, 16 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Purchased with funds given by Dr. and Mrs. Sidney Clyman and Frank L. Babbott Fund 1991.26. Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
I’m particularly interested in how this matrilineal, familial method, which was once passed from aunt to niece and mother to daughter, now extends to a younger generation of artists. Many have come to know Kwali’s work through those who trained with her (Odundo) or through renewed curiosity about this tactile, embodied way of making. What emerges is a living lineage resistant to erasure that continues to shape contemporary art practices globally.
The show spans geographies and histories, from Indigenous African pottery techniques to contemporary experimental forms. How did you approach creating connections across time, place, and artistic practice?
I approached these varied time-place connections by treating clay itself as a unifying thread, as a living archive that carries memory, touch, cultural knowledge, and resistance. I was interested in how the method of hand-building, particularly coiling, offers continuity across generations, geographies, and artistic forms. This traditional technique, rooted in Indigenous African pottery, appears not only in vessels and sculptures but is also reimagined in contemporary works that push clay into conceptual territory. In ‘Body Vessel Clay’, we see this expanded use of clay in the performance documentation, photographs of Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, and video works of Jade de Montserrat and Julia Phillips, where clay becomes metaphor, burden, memory, and gesture. These works embody both the actual material and its symbolic possibilities, demonstrating how artists across various contexts engage with clay in ways that are deeply personal yet historically resonant.
By bringing together practices from artists with connections to Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas, the show maps a lineage of clay work that is both rooted and evolving. It honours ancestral traditions while also embracing the experimentation and hybridity of contemporary Black feminist practices. This approach allowed me to create meaningful connections across time, place, and form, guided by clay’s capacity to hold it all.
Chinasa Vivian Ezugha (Nigeria, b. 1991, lives and works in the United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom), Uro, 2019/2025. Performance documentation for SPILL 2018. Courtesy of the Artist, Uro, a SPILL Commission at SPILL Festival 2018. Photo by Guido Mencari.
Several artists in the show, such as Adebunmi Gbadebo and Phoebe Collings-James, utilise clay to explore memory, ancestry, and spirituality. What conversations emerged between artists around these themes?
The conversations that emerged between Adebunmi Gbadebo and Phoebe Collings-James, centred around themes of memory, ancestry, and spirituality, are deeply rooted in the materiality of clay and its connection to land, body, and the unseen. Gbadebo works with earth sourced from sites directly tied to Black life and death, such as Fort Motte, South Carolina, where her ancestors were enslaved. Her vessels, often embedded with rice and donated Black hair, are acts of remembrance that honour familial and communal histories, using clay as a means of grounding and acknowledging legacies of displacement, labour, and survival.
Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States, b. 1992, lives and works in the United States), Scott, Ida, 1892-1945, Asleep in Jesus, 2024. True Blue Plantation cemetery soil, shoe polish, Carolina Gold rice, white rice, pit-fired, 23 ¾ x 16 ½ x 16 inches. ©Adebunmi Gbadebo. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicola Vassel Gallery. Photo by Lance Brewer
In contrast, yet in conversation, Collings-James’s Infidel series imagines creature-like, armless forms that defy categorisation. These works draw on West African and Caribbean ceramic traditions while invoking a more mystical register. The works on view are glazed in deep blacks and rich blues, evoking moonlight on water and referencing both the water’s memory and the dream state as a space of resistance and spiritual connection. Her use of clay becomes a way to explore what lies beyond the body, ancestral presence, intuitive knowledge, and the unknown.
Together, they both bring forward a shared understanding of clay as more than a material. It is a vessel for memory, a link to place and lineage, and a spiritual medium. Their conversations, whether spoken or unspoken, reflect a collective refusal to separate art from lived experience, and a commitment to using clay to create a space for mourning, dreaming, and ancestral return.
Phoebe Collings-James (United Kingdom, 1987, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Infidel [knot song], 2025. Glazed stoneware ceramic on a blackened steel base, 29 ½ x 9 x 9 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London. Photo by Tom Carter.
The exhibition challenges dominant narratives in ceramics by centring matrilineal knowledge and embodied practice. How does your curatorial work make space for forms of knowledge often excluded from the canon?
In this exhibition, and my wider curatorial practice, I begin by asking what is missing, what stories have been overlooked, who has been historicised through imbalanced lenses, or entirely excluded. Ceramics is a particularly rich yet complex site for this inquiry due to the persistent gendered hierarchies that have long shaped the field. Black women’s labour, especially when connected to craft or utility, has historically been positioned as lesser or outside the domain of ‘fine art.’
By foregrounding matrilineal knowledge, embodied techniques, and lived experiences, I aim to create space for ways of knowing that are often dismissed or undervalued within the dominant canon. This means listening to oral histories, paying attention to inherited techniques, and recognising the spiritual, political, and ancestral significance of clay as a medium. It also means resisting the urge to frame these practices solely through Euro-American art historical frameworks and instead centring the maker/artists’ contexts and epistemologies. 
Doig Simmonds (United Kingdom, b. 1927, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Documentary photographs of PTC and Abuja, 1960s Ladi Kwali and kiln. Photographs (black and white). Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.
Your curatorial practice spans visual art and performance. How does performance—particularly in works like Chisasa Vivian Ezugha’s Uro—reshape how we understand clay as both material and metaphor?
Performance enables clay to transcend its material form and become something lived, felt, and embodied over time. In Chinasa Vivian Ezugha’s Uro (2018), the act of wrestling with a large mound of clay, lifting it, compressing it, and carrying its weight transforms the material into a metaphor for diasporic memory, burden, rebirth, and resilience. Through her durational engagement with clay, Ezugha resituates it from a static medium into one of movement, exhaustion, struggle, and renewal. It becomes a living archive, activated by the body. I have always been drawn to practices that challenge extractive or distanced ways of viewing, and
Performance Art disrupts these habits by foregrounding process, vulnerability, and relationality. In ‘Body Vessel Clay’, performance becomes a powerful tool for rethinking the role of clay, not only as a material shaped by the hands, but also as something that shapes back, that resists, and that remembers. This approach is grounded in an epistemology that privileges embodied knowledge and Black feminist thought, where the act of making is political and the body is both archive and agent. Through works like Uro, we see that clay is never inert; it breathes, burdens, listens, and, when animated by the body, speaks across histories and geographies.
After acclaimed presentations in London and York, the show now makes its U.S. debut at the Ford Foundation Gallery. What new layers or resonances does the New York context bring to the exhibition?
It remains a profound privilege to curate this exhibition and to carry the responsibility of engaging with Ladi Kwali’s legacy and the enduring tradition of Gbari women’s pottery. In 1972, Kwali toured the United States, captivating audiences with her skill and presence, including during a stop in New York City. Bringing ‘Body Vessel Clay’ here now feels like a kind of homecoming, especially for her vessels, a resonant and meaningful way to conclude this chapter of the exhibition’s journey.
The presentations in London and York were expansive, featuring over 150 objects. In this iteration, the focus sharpens, drawing more direct connections between Kwali’s influence and contemporary artists working with clay today. Anina Major, Adebunmi Gbadebo, and Simone Leigh extend this conversation through their inclusion, as does Phoebe Collings-James with her most recent Infidel series.
A pot is never just a pot. Clay’s expansiveness and its transformative possibilities in the hands of Black women are something we must attend to and celebrate.
The exhibition will be on view from September 10 until December 6, 2025. For more information, please visit the Ford Foundation Gallery.
