Phoebe Collings-James – A Scratch! A Scratch!

Phoebe Collings-James’ (b. 1987, London, UK) wide-ranging practice encompasses sculpture, video, sound and performance. For her first solo exhibition in a UK institution, she has created a sensual environment combining sound and sculpture that unfolds from undercurrents of grief, heartbreak and desire.

As the third recipient of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship, Collings-James has spent the last six months working onsite developing several new bodies of work presented here. The subtle rules the dense (2021) is a group of torso casings that resemble Roman armour plates, relics of the reckless pursuit of conflict. A series of multi-panel clay paintings continues the artist’s work with sgraffito – a process that inscribes the surfaces with images, words and phrases. Many of these are recurring motifs and emerge from the artist’s interest in non-linear storytelling and symbolic language. They include imagery from mythological and religious traditions, such as the form of the spider which appears in Ashanti folktale as the trickster Anansi, the god of stories.