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Making Connections Through Clay at Frieze London

In a new section, Indigenous and expatriate artists explore land loved, lost and left behind in a medium well suited to the task: ceramics.

By Ray Mark Rinaldi
Oct. 3, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

The Cecilia Brunson Projects will show works at Frieze London by Lucía Pizzani, including a series of totem-like objects like this one, “Flora Totem Pino” (2023).Credit...via the artist and Cecilia Brunson Projects

 

When Frieze London invited Pablo José Ramírez to curate a themed section for its 2024 edition, he knew right away that he wanted to feature clay. He already had a list in his head, he said, of ceramic artists whose work he hoped to show together.

 

“Smoke,” as the section is now titled, will feature 11 artists, represented by eight galleries. The galleries will be lined up together within the fair, but separated by transparent fabrics so that they appear to connect into a single environment — a departure from the usual rows of walled-off dealers that visitors more often encounter at fairs like Frieze, Art Basel and the Armory Show.

 

But the concept behind “Smoke” is also wide enough to include artists like Lucía Pizzani, a Venezuelan expatriate now living in London. Pizzani is not Indigenous, though her work borrows from long-held traditions of her native country.

 

Several of the pieces she will exhibit, with Cecilia Brunson Projects of London, were created during a recent residency at El Cercado studio, located on Isla de Margarita, an island north of the Venezuelan mainland, where pre-Hispanic ceramic making is still practiced. The works are made with local clay, which is shaped, dried and then fired over an open flame, rather than in a kiln.

 

She will also show a series of totem-like objects she made of English clay for Whichford Pottery, in Warwickshire, some 80 miles from London. Pizzani imbues her artworks with a timeless aura by decorating them with symbols from nature, including imprints made from plants.

 

“I try to find symbols and things that connect us as humans, that you can find throughout history and in different geographies,” she said during a video interview. “So, like the snake, the spiral, a lot of the imagery that I use, maybe you can place it, but maybe not, and it’s something that unites us in the unconscious.”

 

Credits

Article by Ray Mark Rinaldi
NYTimes Digital
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