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‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

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New York Observer 

“The ancestral African tradition to which I belong tells me that clay is a portal. It is not inert. It breathes and it remembers,” writes Dr. Jareh Das, curator of “Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art” at the Ford Foundation Gallery. ‘Body Vessel Clay’ reads as a directive, much like ‘lights, camera, action.’ There is a performance embedded in each noun. The presentation of this work is a black cube—an intentional decomposition of the colonial “white cube gallery aesthetic.” When inside the space, the viewer is confronted with the splendor and sheen of artist Ladi Kwali’s large vessels, photographs of her making the work and archival material related to her practice.

Pivoting from the show’s original form, which was a retrospective on Kwali a century after her birth, Das decided to include her contemporary Halima Audu and extend it to American, Caribbean and British makers who are her legacy. While Kwali was “not formally educated, childless and working within a colonial framework designed to contain her, [she] nonetheless resisted the limitations imposed on her,” the room formed a metaphorical womb. It contracts around the work of Kwali with a singular window into the future—it acts as a portal. Kwali birthed new generations of women across the globe who saw and reflected themselves in clay. In many ways, they cast their ideologies in that of Kwali, who learned from her aunt before her and straddled the worlds of ancient and modern, African and European.

From there, the space opens to a central plinth on the subject of matrilineal knowledge and sharing, which features a low-fired demonstration pot of Kwali paired with a low-fired, incised vessel of a ceramist who benefited from her in-person tutelage, Magdalene Odundo, along with works by Halima Audu, Bisila Noha and Anina Major. Many of the conversations between the works were their naturalist forms, like the reptilian motifs on Kwali’s vase and coral-like forms of Major’s work.

The space is truly a web and a masterclass in curatorial sightline. The white interwoven rungs of Major’s work, modeled after Bahamian basket weaving, speak to Simone Leigh’s Village Series, which is a large curved dome with cornrow buttresses. Weaving and braiding within West African cultures are often correlated terms and processes. Noha’s Waterjug has an elongated neck like Magdalene Odundo’s works. They are each burnished to a matte sheen that recalls the glassy surface of Kwali’s water jugs at the start of the exhibition. Kwali’s demonstration piece echoes the unfired mound of manipulated clay paired with pictures of a deeply somatic performance by Chinasa Vivian Ezugha. Even the two other performance video works run parallel with each other: Clay by Jade de Montserrat, where the artist is in a hole in the ground in the English countryside, naked, digging into the earth and laying it in. It’s as if she is dust and to dust she is returning; there’s a comfort. That work is in dialogue with the more jarring Becoming (the Hunter, the Twerker, the Submitter) by Julia Phillips, which cuts from the stretching and quick motion of a cracking neck to hands breaking apart clay and the subject eating clay. Instead of belonging, the work is about objectification and consumption, crucial components of this conversation about Kwali and others in her tradition in the West, as British potter Michael Cardew went to Nigeria to study pottery and through his lens many of us know of Kwali’s work. All of the performance work that Das includes—because the show is less about clay and more about materiality in her eyes—I’d expand that to say that we are left with documentation or, in the case of clay, the material remnants of a bodily and ecological process. We are left with alchemy.

The standout works of the show are gathered together in the left-hand corner, three Bisila Noha works in a vitrine—Kouame Vessel, B10 Two-Legged Vessel and Womb Vessel—that all have a mouth where the torso, arms and legs should be, while the bottom of the vessel swells in two directions to create thighs, made in 2021; Adebunmi Gbadebo’s work Scott, Ida 1892-1945, Asleep in Jesus (2024) that has a rusted and browned patina and contains rice, a commodity of enslavement in South Carolina, which looks across the room at her other work, Sam (2023), with human hair as a rung on its clay body (both works specifically added to this leg of the show).

These works join the magnum opus of the show, Phoebe Collings-James’s Infidels [Knot Song]. Starting with the powerful title, it suggests a sense of refusal and alludes to a song that’s sung in unison by the three works in the triptych. The artist says, “I often use knots in my work because of the layered symbolism of binding being both a mark of unity, a spiritual weaving and also of being bound by duty or incarceration.” She continues, “The knot song directly relates as the work has a knot that forms its hair/spine and also is vocal, open-mouthed song. I imagine the knot song as a lugubrious lullaby over moonlight.” Often when I visit shows, I ask myself which works contain a multitude of stories that, if they stand alone, could reveal the exhibition’s story and I landed on this work. The three tall vessels on the floor, whose elongated necks and parted mouths seem to be communicating something, embody what Das writes: “Clay, in this sense, is more than material. It is a vessel of knowledge, a guardian of secrets, a keeper of ancestral continuity.” This further reminded me of Ntozake Shange’s immortal words: “Where there is a woman, there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.” Maybe I tarried with the work because I recognized magic in it and was reflecting the magic within myself, but I found myself leaning in to listen.

“Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art” is at the Ford Foundation Gallery through December 6, 2025. Pre-registration is required; submit the form by 5 p.m. EDT on the day before your visit.

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