Exhibition at the V&A South Kensington surveying clay as sculpture from the mid-1980s to the present, with work by Gormley, de Waal, Poncelet and Twomey.
Sculpture in Clay opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 29 May 2027, and it's a look at how clay has moved from the craft shelf to the centre of contemporary sculpture. The exhibition surveys the medium from the mid-1980s to the present, showing how it's expanded what sculpture can be. For a long time, clay was treated as the lesser, domestic, and gendered material—filed under craft and kept in the ceramics gallery rather than the sculpture court. Over the last twenty years, that's shifted, and it's moved right into the middle of contemporary sculpture.
The V&A holds one of the world's greatest ceramics collections and has long wrestled with where the line between art and craft falls. This show presents clay as a potentially radical, avant-garde medium that lets artists reinterpret, subvert, and challenge conventional ceramic practice. It points to Grayson Perry winning the Turner Prize with pots in 2003, and notes that potters who spent forty years in the craft section have been reclassified around artists like Magdalene Odundo. Jacqueline Poncelet's Object in 3 Parts (1986) hangs over the show as its header image.
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Among the artists on display are Jacqueline Poncelet, Antony Gormley, Edmund de Waal, and Clare Twomey. Admission to the V&A South Kensington is free, though some exhibitions and events carry a separate charge. The V&A is on Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL.
