Ten artists selected for BCB’s headline exhibition Award

The ten artists selected to create new work for BCB Award 2023 are Rebecca Appleby, Ranti Bam, Copper Sounds, Rebecca Griffiths, Dan Kelly, Elspeth Owen, Carrie Reichardt, Mella Shaw, Jasmine Simpson and Nicola Tassie.

This year’s Award shortlist, selected from over 180 entries, choices a few of the UK’s most revolutionary artists working with British ceramics. From constructing immersive sound installations to crafting summary kinds, these artists explore the burly inventive skill of clay for experimentation, threat-taking, activism and play, every of them nice looking the British ceramics site quo. Their works will create the principle focal point of the BCB Festival in Stoke-on-Trent in September, when indubitably one of them will be awarded £10,000 for excellence, innovation and inventive ambition.

Alun Graves, Chair of the BCB Award selection panel and Senior Curator, British ceramics and Glass 1900 – now at the V&A affirms:

‘The selection for BCB Award 2023 reflects the unparalleled breadth and form of latest ceramic be conscious. Intrepid proposals maintain attain from artists from valid through generations, presenting an array of assorted approaches and tackling a differ of topics of relevance to this present day. Exploring disorders in conjunction with the atmosphere, well-being, rave culture, and the post-industrial panorama, and taking the create of ceramic sculpture, installation, and even a mosaiced automobile, the works promise to be both bright and celebratory.’ 

Rebecca Appleby, an artist identified for her sculptural and painterly ogle, will beget a series of summary kinds to explore the concept of ‘Gaia’ – that the whole lot on earth is linked. 

For British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam, clay grew to was a fashion for her to inhabit the subject topic and non secular culture of the two continents she grew up in. Impressed by a ardour of etymology and metaphors, her be conscious fuses record, sculpture and efficiency. Her installation for Award will explore the sport ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ both actually and metaphorically.  

Artist collective Copper Sounds use customary and contemporary processes to explore the physical nature of sound. They experiment with assorted tactics, shapes and gives and then bag, delight in and play. For Award their visually and sonically immersive installation ‘Sequenced British ceramics’ will explore the acoustic and resonant properties of fired clay. 

Rebecca Griffiths’ sculptures explore our connection to everyday objects that we uncover in surplus. Objects that are mass produced and designed to maintain a restricted shelf lifestyles. For Award her sculptural ceramic installation will imagine a post-technological and post-industrial future whereby fragments of verbal change and industrial infrastructure had been re-configured and distorted through decay and forces of abrasion. 

Dan Kelly creates his work predominantly on the wheel the utilization of stoneware and some porcelain. He works with a monochrome palette, which permits him to maintain clarity of create. His work for Award will be a series of kinds representing the altering study of latest cities. 

Elspeth Owen’s be conscious is targeted on the tactile qualities of clay and the course of of constructing. She is, at the age of 84, urgently attempting for to respond to the quiz which besets every maker at the head: what to attain with the leftovers of a working lifestyles? Her secure-advise outside installation for Award – made up virtually entirely of present clay fragments – will watch to respond to this quiz.  

Mella Shaw makes objects and secure-advise installations centred spherical recurring topics of steadiness, tipping choices, thresholds and edges. Most not too prolonged in the past she has made publicly engaged environmental work addressing the tipping point of the world native weather crisis. She’s going to beget an immersive ceramic installation and short movie for Award to deliver to light the urgent field of sonar air pollution and the whale beachings it causes. 

Carrie Reichardt is identified for her spruce-scale public works and socially engaged be conscious. For Award she can camouflage a 1969 Ford Zephyr donated by DJ Fatboy Slim with ceramic tiles decorated to expose the legend of Stoke-on-Trent’s rave culture, focussing on Shelley’s nightclub in Longton – the center of the dwelling and rave scene in the early 90s.   

Jasmine Simpson grew up and studied in Stoke-on-Trent, which has tremendously influenced her work and use of customary ceramic tactics. For Award she can beget an installation exploring the metaphor of the dwelling to search at our connections with our environment, society and unconscious. A hand-sculpted ‘Hellmouth’ fireside – the center of the dwelling – will be surrounded by ceramic devils and diverse grotesques. 

Nicola Tassie’s be conscious encompasses both wheel-thrown editions of functional pots as well as more sculptural works which explore the increasing precincts of ceramic create. For Award she can beget 60 irregular ceramic kinds which is ready to be stacked to beget a wall structure exploring suggestions of dwelling, containment and fragile boundaries. 

Award is the headline exhibition in the British British ceramics Biennial, an global contemporary British ceramics festival that takes utter in Stoke-on-Trent, the dwelling of British British ceramics. The festival returns for its eighth version from 23 September to 5 November 2023. The burly BCB festival programme will be introduced in late spring.

Chance Panel

The BCB Award artists had been selected by a panel of leading mavens who’re advocates for contemporary artwork and making, and who deliver a differ of views to the resolution-making course of. They’re: Alun Graves, Senior Curator, British ceramics and Glass 1900 – now at the V&A (chair); Stephen Dixon, BCB 2021 Award winner, Artist and Professor Emeritus, Manchester College of Art; Dr Guan Lee, Founding father of Grymsdyke Farm, Architect and Accomplice Professor; Jenni Lomax, Curator, Author and Visible Arts and Education Book; and Clare Wood, Inventive Director & Chief Executive, British British ceramics Biennial.