LONDON.- What is our true identity? Or do we have many? How do we make a sense of self? The Foundling Museum’s autumn exhibition, Self-Made, is a group show reflecting on the complexities of identity and self-determination through the medium of ceramics.
The creation of self-identity can be a challenging yet profoundly empowering process. Our unique identities are influenced by layers of history, memory and experience. Throughout our lives, we continuously strive to take control of the narratives that shape us as we attempt to understand how we fit into the world. Encompassing lost, hidden, re-made or re-claimed identities, Self-Made reveals fresh connections with the enduring stories of identity, care and belonging at the heart of the Foundling Museum.
Featuring Rachel Kneebone, Matt J Smith, Renee So and a new commission by Phoebe Collings-James, this exhibition brings together work by four artists who use clay in different ways to explore embodied narratives, the construction of self and the capacity for physical and emotional transformation. Touching on class, gender, sexuality, cultural heritage and historical legacies, each piece represents an intimate interaction between artist and material, moulded, cast and inscribed with new narratives and forms of expression.
The myriad ways in which identity is formed and reformed throughout our lives is mirrored in the shape-shifting properties of clay with its infinite possibilities for moulding, sculpting and metamorphosis. Clay is subject to many altered states, beginning as soft and pliable, often changing colour as well as texture when exposed to air, heat and force. In the hands of the maker, it retains a physical trace, preserving the imprint of human touch. It can also be unpredictable. Identity is similarly influenced by a combination of genetic, environmental and historical factors as we adapt to our circumstances and become moulded by our experiences, in ways that cannot always be anticipated or controlled.
Incorporating elements from ancient cultures, hidden histories, fractured memories and future possibilities, Self-Made creates an intimate conversation between the past and the present, prompting us to consider the fluid nature of our own identity and the myriad factors and conditions that determine our sense of who we are and the multifaceted versions of ourselves we create.
Phoebe Collings-James’s work engages with experiences of hybridity, exploring themes of violence, fear and desire in the contemporary world. Collings-James first took up ceramics during a residency in Italy and has since made it her principal medium, she also works with sound, installation, painting and performance. In 2019 she founded Mudbelly, a ceramics studio offering free courses in ceramics for Black people in London. Recent exhibitions include A Scratch! A Scratch!, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK, 2021 and In Practice, Sculpture Center, New York, US, 2024.
Rachel Kneebone’s work addresses and questions the ways we inhabit the body; movement, stasis, renewal, growth, constraint and freedom. Working primarily in porcelain sculpture that embraces the unpredictable nature of its medium, Kneebone focuses on ideas of transformation, metamorphosis and suspension and the material manifestation of our fluid physical and psychical states. Kneebone has said that her work is 'concerned with inhabiting the body, what it is to be alive in the world'. Recent exhibitions include 399 Days, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2021/22.
Using clay and its associated references, Matt Smith’s work explores how cultural organisations operate using techniques of institutional critique and artist intervention. He is interested in how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative that presents itself as a fixed and accurate account of the past and how, though taking objects and repurposing them in new situations, or creating ‘lost objects’, this can be brought to light. Of particular interest to him is how museums can be reframed from an outsider perspective, and often from an LGBTQ+ viewpoint. Recent exhibitions include Untold Lives, Kensington Palace, 2024 and Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2020.
Renee So’s sculptures are defined by their process of making as much as by their fictional personas. So’s sculptures draw from the traditions of Antiquity and historical portrait busts, interweaving cross-cultural references, including prehistoric Europe, Africa, Meso-America, ancient Egypt, Assyria and China. Her fictional personas also borrow from ancient ritual masks, military and aristocratic portraiture. As with people, So’s figures often take on unique characters that invite us to imagine their backstories, while demonstrating that identity is a shifty business, built on tangled traditions and stereotypes. Recent exhibitions include Provenance, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and University of New South Wales Galleries, Sydney, 2023 Effigies and Elginisms, Cample Line, Scotland, 2022 and Ancient and Modern, De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2019.
