Six voices in clay: exploring identity, place & process
At Corrie Bain International Ceramics School, we believe that clay expresses more than form and function – it also holds stories about the maker and their practice and inspirations. For Black History Month, we present six makers whose ceramic practices engage with identity, place, heritage and the materiality of clay itself. They come from across the African diaspora and continent, and their work shows how ceramics can be deeply personal and political.
Anina Major
Anina Major is a visual artist born in Nassau, Bahamas, whose work investigates self, place, and displacement through ceramics, weaving, and installation. Her technique of “plaiting” clay (or weaving clay strips) is directly inspired by straw weaving she witnessed growing up, especially by her grandmother, who made baskets to sell in the straw market. In an interview, Major elaborates on the theme of weaving in her work:
“I do like the symbolic gesture of weaving and what it means for Bahamian straw vendors that work in this fashion. I think about how this is a much larger performance. When you look at the history of that craft and how it’s undervalued even by the people who engage with it, I wanted to look for other ways in which that can be meaningful. I’m interested in how this act or language of weaving can communicate in ways that have not been done before.
It is believed that the history of this technique comes from enslaved individuals who were transported from Africa to the Caribbean. So when I think about the fact that this language or this gesture of weaving has a layered history within it, I’m really fascinated by that. I’m fascinated by my lineage to that and how I can use that technique to talk about my lived experiences without words.”
Major’s work is rooted in nostalgia, identity and the tension of living away from a place one feels deeply about. Her pieces range from handheld vessels to large-scale installations and performances. The method of weaving clay, combining it with fragments, shells, sea glass, or crushed ceramic shards creates works that speak to permanence, fragility, loss, and restoration.
Adeoti Azeez Afeez
From Nigeria (Oyo State, working in Lagos), Adeoti Azeez Afeez is a ceramicist who focuses on sgraffito: scratching through an engobe coated clay surface to reveal contrasting colours beneath.
His work is shaped by Yoruba heritage and personal reflection, using traditional motifs and figurative elements to connect subject and medium. For example, in one vase he depicted his mother via sgraffito; drawing her image as a way to position women and earth as sources of life.
“My journey as a sgraffito ceramicist revolves around the intricate dance of revealing contrasting colors on engobe-coated clay,” he explains. “Through the delicate art of cross-hatching, I breathe life into my works, infusing them with depth, tone, and chiaroscuro. My artistic inspiration is a fusion of two powerful forces: my Yoruba roots and a profound sense of self-consciousness. I draw from the rich tapestry of Yoruba traditions, incorporating elements of identity and introspection into every piece. This cultural and personal interplay infuses my art with a unique vibrancy, bridging the gap between heritage and self-expression.”
His pieces tend to have rich texture, pattern, contrast, and they often juxtapose traditional visual vocabulary with contemporary forms. They invite viewers to see both what is visible and what is revealed – both surface and depth.
See more of his work on Instagram.
Chris Bramble
Chris Bramble is a London-based potter and ceramic artist whose work combines wheel-thrown forms, hand-sculpting, carvings, and figurative elements. His practice is informed by both his African heritage and European visual traditions.
After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art, Bramble spent time in Zimbabwe, where he spent time in a workshop learning to carve semi-precious stones. “This fed into my ceramics practice when I returned to England,” he explains. “My work became more figurative, and I began to combine hand-built sculptural elements with thrown ware.I think of each piece I make as individual, so there is no rigid thought process, it is very organic.”
His pieces often include sculpted faces or torsos emerging from vessels, or forms that bear decorative incisions, patterning, and motifs that speak to hidden aspects of Black culture and lived experience. He describes his process as meditative: capturing the rhythm, spirit, heartbeat of people around him. “I am inspired by everyday life,” he explains, “and love to work alongside a wide range of people. This led me to set up a studio in London to share my skills with others and eventually work with my daughter. For me, teaching is as important as my own practice and my greatest reward is seeing those who I have taught succeed.
For Chris, clay is not just form but dialogue: between cultures, between maker and community, teacher and student.
See more of his work on his website.
Syd Carpenter
Syd Carpenter is an African-American sculptor and ceramicist whose work often engages with the landscape of the garden, and with themes of nurture and care. Inspired by her mother and grandmother, both of whom were master gardeners, her work responds to African-American farms and gardens.
“I started looking at gardens and gardeners and thinking about, well, What’s my history as an African American on the land in this country?” Syd explains. “And that’s really important because there are preconceived notions about African Americans on the land, primarily around the issue and the state of enslavement. And after that, there was sharecropping. So generally being on the land was associated with a negative experience. And I knew, through my grandmother and through my mother, that being on the land and having their own land and producing food and ornamental gardens was something that brought them a lot of joy. So I knew that that [suffering] could not be the case for everyone.”
For Carpenter, garden is not just setting but metaphor: she speaks of refuge, of the contradictions in things that seem tranquil but contain life, decay, tension. “You think of a garden as a refuge of beauty and order,” she says. “But, there are real life issues acting out. Rupture. Discord. Violence. All these things you wouldn’t expect to take place in a garden.” Her vases and vessels often bear forms that allude to motion and life, the internal relations between nature, family, memory. Specific details from the different farms she visited in her research are picked out and captured in clay.
Carpenter’s work bridges the functional and the sculptural, and holds stories of care: caring for sibling illness, caring for soil, caring for histories. The garden becomes a site of witness and survival.
Ranti Bam
Ranti Bam, Nigerian-born, based in the UK, makes vessels that are boldly textural, often colourful, often combining thrown bases with slab work and collaged pieces, but her route to ceramics was circuitous.
Bam always knew she wanted to make things, and thought a design course was the best way to achieve that goal. After her MA Research in Project, she enrolled on a ceramics course at City Lit in London. “I am very happy that I have found my material in which to express myself,” she says. “For me, clay is a metaphysical thing. It’s a gift.”
Her work references textile patterns, slip work, stained slips, and inspired by connection and communication. “We speak to encompass our experiences into a tangible thing, to share. My work contains metaphors that I can show to others,” she explains. She often works intuitively: “It’s about saying to the clay, ‘show me what you can do! Where can we go together?’” she says. “It’s important to me to be able to work freely, quickly and just let things flow.”
Her work foregrounds narrative and examines the semiotics of the feminine through the lens of craft traditions drawn from Lagos, London and beyond. Her surfaces might be left unglazed or lightly glazed; the textures evoke cloth, movement and the body. Bam pushes her materials (e.g. firing terracotta high, using slips/stains) to accentuate not only colour but tactility, warmth, and a sense of life.
Check out more of her work on Instagram.
Winnie Owens-Hart
Winnie Owens-Hart is a ceramicist and educator whose work is deeply influenced by West African pottery traditions, particularly techniques from Nigeria and Ghana, but also shaped by explorations of form, cultural memory and identity. She studied ceramics at the Philadelphia College of Art, but was frustrated by their limited curriculum. “My mission back then, in my early 20s, was to visit every country on the African continent,” she recalls, “then bring all the information back, and let them know there was something in ceramics beyond Asian art and Wedgwood.”
Her apprenticeships in Nigeria and Ghana informed her technical approach to building vessels, and her work explores African-American traditions and social themes, both personal and universal. In one long-running series, Little Women, she explores female genital mutilation alongside soothing and mourning. “I’ll stop making them when they stop mutilating women,” Owens-Hart states, “but they’re about more than that. In some cases they’re engineered so that if you push them just a little, they rock. Women rock their babies to soothe them, and they rock their bodies when they’re mourning. They’re about things women do globally.”
Another series is called African American Women. These large-scale, sculptural works usually feature partial figures, and explore history, tradition and memory from a personal but also a social perspective.
Clay as a medium of expression
What connects these makers is more than race or cultural background – it’s the way each uses clay not just to make vessels or forms, but to transmit narratives and to preserve cultural inheritance. They bring lineage, disrupted histories, everyday life, emotion, and place into their ceramic work.
For students and makers at Corrie Bain, there are lessons in technique, in intention, in how identity can be embedded in form:
- Listening to materials: many of these artists speak of letting clay “do what it wants”; working intuitively and embracing imperfection.
- Surface, sculpture and mark-making convey meaning: sgraffito, carving, texture, shell, shards – all these surfaces bear symbolism.
- Transmission: many combine making with teaching, community work and preserving craft traditions.
- Balance of utility and sculpture: many works live at the threshold between object you can use and object you look at.
These artists already map out a richer, more nuanced territory of Black ceramic practice. We hope you’ll be inspired to explore their work, reflect on your own practice, ask questions of identity, place, narrative, and explore how clay can act not just as a material, but a medium of remembering and belonging.