File Note 134: Phoebe Collings-James

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncoloured margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow colouring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the colour had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly colouring it. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colours my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitises and strengthens all my experience.
Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Phoebe Collings-James’s ceramic sculptures are embodied and fragmented, disobedient objects that break away from the formal conventions of a medium historically rooted in classist ideals, gendered domesticity and functionality. Embracing ambiguous and liminal spaces, they reposition the image of the maker as a Black queer woman and are imbued with performative gestures pertinent to their creation. Traces of the maker (hand, touch, imprint) are still evident even after surfaces have been glazed, fired, marked, inscribed and painted on. They are highly personal in both their subject matter and physical form. 

My first introduction to the work of Collings-James was through Emmanuel, a mutual friend, who suggested initiating a studio visit during a trip to New York in 2017. This encounter never happened, but I did look her up online, discovering a sculpture-centred practice extending to film, performance, drawing, sound and ceramics. I was struck by her fleshy ceramic tongues, sensual yet assembled as if they had been violently removed from a body. She has since returned home to London, extending her personal ceramics practice to Mudbelly, an explorative pottery space encompassing a shop and roaming teaching facility offering free ceramics courses to Black people, led by Black ceramicists. Her approach draws inspiration from the legacy of African-American ceramicist Doyle Lane, whose innovative and visceral ceramics practice allowed him to create a socially conscious and sustainable business for himself, which was a vital contribution to West coast ceramics and a remarkable achievement in the face of the racism and economic inequity that surrounded him in 1970s California. 

The works I encountered through my screen-based research were from the artist’s solo exhibition Choke on Your Tongue at the Italian Cultural Institute, London, in 2015. These works, I have since found out, marked the first time Collings-James worked with ceramics as the result of time spent on the NUOVE//Residency in Italy – a programme aimed at international artists interested in gaining skills and experimenting in the medium. 

Ten bright flesh-coloured tongues bearing the title Lingua (2014) were scattered on a low-level white plinth, whilst with Medusa (2014) smaller red flickering tongues burst out of an ambiguous (torso-like) vessel trying to contain them. A lone, larger, muscular tongue titled Creep (Orange and Moss) (2014) was placed casually on a gilded cream and mint chaise lounge, as if left behind. But by whom? Severed by whom? All of these sculptural objects exist in their own agency whilst performatively escaping the bodies that once contained them. This brings to mind the phrase ‘severed tongue’, which might be read as a metaphor for emancipation from the heaviness of language and speech, as Moses declared to God: ‘I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.’⁶

Fluctuating between specimens and relics, the sculptures in Choke on Your Tongue deconstruct the human form into fragmented parts, revealing a distorted but familiar anatomy. The fleshy, organ-like, slippery and sexual qualities of the works suggest an unseen body and thus acknowledge the historical framing of the human body as a tension between scientific endeavours and religious systems of belief. The performative object represents a ‘curve of tension’ that confronts the viewer with a situation that unsettles normative action or thinking, leading one to question, reflect upon, and re-shape one’s interaction with such an object.

The lust and machismo of friendship.
The Chaos of Love.
Conflict without resolution.
They have made worms’ meat of me
Wetness and tensile materials

To take up working with clay requires an acceptance of dealing with constant ruptures (failures) in the making process as mishaps occur at any stage. It is a constant process of negotiation with the unexpected, from glazing glitches to cracked pots and dramatic kiln explosions, all of which are all-too-familiar to those who spend time working with a medium that demands a wealth of knowledge, patience and painstaking skills. Collings-James explained clay’s ritual (and repetitive) technologies to me in an email exchange: ‘I think of the fact that my wrist is currently strained from throwing, the anticipation and regular event of opening up a kiln to see that the forms have decided to twist or melt in directions opposite to my own plans for them … Clay is malleable, yes, but it also shapes you as it is reciprocal and it has limits.’ Within this context, her sculptures and objects express a certain level of self-awareness and at times their physiological expressions are serene, self-empowered and inviting, while at others they appear introspective, uneasy and distressed. The juxtaposition of performative gestures and lived experiences onto three-dimensional objects provides a perspective to remind us all that in seeking relatedness between objects, the tiniest detail can connect to a much wider range of semantics, ideas and social realms. This might lead to a shaping of self-perceptions of the body that oscillate between the physical, functional, abstract and spiritual.