“Clay is an incredible medium to hold narrative,” says Xanthe Summers, who turns to the medium as a technique to discover themes round domesticity, craft, and so-called “women’s work” like cleansing, mending, working with textiles, and caregiving. Relating to clay, she says, “I think mostly I am invigorated by its ability to hold—to hold water, to hold function, to give shape, to carry stories, and to carry meaning.”
At present based mostly in London, Summers grew up in Zimbabwe, the place she noticed inequities inside the social construction that mirror many locations all over the world, particularly when it comes to gendered labor inside the home sphere that always goes largely unseen and unacknowledged. She explains that “many homes have cleaners and gardeners who exist within this ‘invisible’ framework: caring for children, cooking their meals, and sometimes traveling for hours—and their work is underpaid, undervalued, and considered unskilled.”
Summers faucets into ceramics, particularly the archetypal vessel motif, to hitch the ever-evolving continuum of the medium. All through millennia and throughout myriad distinct cultures, the earthen materials has discovered limitless purposes within the dwelling, trade, and artwork. “Clay has the unique ability to cross the boundaries between functionality, art, craft, class, and culture, and because of this, it is a vital medium to hold stories about humankind,” she says. “I understand clay to be an archive for the stories of humans.”
The artist’s vessels usually tackle figurative proportions, standing tall on plinths and exhibiting saturated hues, daring patterns, and tactile textures. Among the items crumple, particularly towards the highest, as if hit with one thing or caving below some invisible weight.
The artist’s vessels tread the boundary between kind and performance and delve into one other craft usually related to ladies’s labor: weaving. She describes how all the things from the sheets we sleep on to the carpets we tread throughout to the garments on our again could be “extrapolated to speak more broadly about domesticity, women’s work, and racialized spaces in Zimbabwe and the Global South.” She provides:
Weaving can be utilized as a wider metaphor for social cohesion—or lack thereof. This predicament is critical in Zimbabwe however is clear the world over, the place ladies’s work is undervalued.
Subsequent yr, Summers embarks on a visit to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a residency at Ceramica Suro, the place she’s going to study from native ceramic artists, glassblowers, and weavers. And this October, you’ll have the ability to see her work at London’s 1-54, a good devoted to modern African artwork, which runs from October 16 to 19. Discover extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
