I love a pot. Ceramics, for me, have always held a strange allure, their textures and alchemical colours highly covetable and dangerously tactile. Imagine my delight then at the news of the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition, Strange Clay, exploring the use of the medium by contemporary artists and in which pots are very much just the start.
In fact only a couple of the 23 international, multi-generational artists in this show make anything like a traditional pot; Grayson Perry, of course, who uses the familiar form as a vehicle for witty social commentary, and the peerless Magdalene Odundo, whose ethereally smooth vessels evoke the human body with their bulbous lines, apertures and nodules forming maws and navels.
