Strange Clay is a wild surprise. Totem poles of chimney pots sprout beckoning fingers and toby jug handles. Distant minarets float on the horizon. Curious stumps glow like molten lava. There are Post-it notes scrawled with resentful messages, sea creatures sprawled on the floor and winged sprites hidden among the foliage of a life-size glade. And all of it is made in ceramic.
The Hayward Gallery has caught the moment with this enormous clay exhibition, for the ancient medium has become a contemporary phenomenon. So much so that this show can afford to leave out Ai Weiwei’s priceless Han dynasty urns painted with Coca-Cola logos or Theaster Gates’s hand-thrown vessels, with their meditations on African American politics, to show the work of 23 other international names.
Some are familiar. There is a modest group of early Grayson Perry pots, so fetching with their gold decals, until you get closer and see the images of abjection, porn and childhood poverty. There are the small-scale but high-impact objects of the Californian pioneer Ron Nagle, rugged and nubbed surfaces coated with iridescent car spray and liquid gold. And almost inevitably, there are the elegant whispers of Edmund de Waal, in this case small, white porcelain vessels gathered in suspended vitrines so that they resemble solid cumulus clusters above you.
The most senior artist here is the late American ceramicist Betty Woodman (1930-2018), whose work fuses painting and sculpture. Woodman was fascinated by the uses of clay, high and low: the Grecian urn and the bathroom tile, the flowerpot and the terracotta patio. Images of all are united in her marvellous House of the South, with its overtones of Roman frescoes and shiny garden-centre glazes, all flattened in dizzying, high-colour fragments like a cartoon explosion against the wall.
Its diametric opposite, in spirit, is an installation by the Chinese artist Liu Jianhua composed of almost a thousand pieces. Regular/Fragile is a catastrophic rain of white porcelain objects cascading down the walls: shoes, toys, hot water bottles, socks, the soft and tender world rendered hard, but also alarmingly fragile. Liu made what is effectively a memorial after a devastating plane crash in China, where the relics of human life drifted out across the ocean: a tide of consumerism that outlived those who died.
Contemporary art uses clay against itself, at times, or at least counterintuitively. Telephones, sinks, excrement, all cast in clay. The London-born artist Lindsey Mendick has a whole house full of ceramic vermin, from cockroaches in the kitchen to slugs on the walls and what appears to be an octopus clambering out of the lavatory. She is also the artist of the Post-it note war waged by the couple who live here; marriage, to Mendick, a brittle household hell.
Several of these works remind you just how much of our world is ceramic. The Tanzania-born artist Lubna Chowdhary paints geometric abstractions on outsize tiles, deploying the fundamental grid you might find on a floor or in a shower. Serena Korda’s gigantic necklace of ceramic beads spreading out across the gallery is inspired by the myth of Parthenope, a siren who filled the Bay of Naples with her tears.
The immaculate art of Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo begins with the humble vessel – a pot, a vase, a jug – and gives each a unique personality of its own. They lean, they bow, they appear to listen, open mouthed; their curves carry hints of pregnancy. Each is fired and burnished in her trademark reds and blacks and each turns a functional object into an eloquently anthropomorphic sculpture.
Odundo is outstanding here, in so many ways, not least because her work is such an immaculately inventive extension of age-old techniques. The artist of the totem poles, Jonathan Baldock, also refers to the history of clay with his chimney pots and his waste-paper baskets spewing ceramic buttons and supermarket tokens. All are incised with motifs, in the manner of ancient clay tablets, except that Baldock replaces the complex beauty of Cuneiform script with today’s wordless emojis.
The fragility of clay is barely exploited, unless you consider Rachel Kneebone’s tangles of white porcelain ribbons, limbs, vines and nameless organic forms hanging by a thread from the ceiling. Here and there, in the casting process, the threat of fissure emerges explicitly. But so often in this show the material is disguised, its vulnerability disappearing into the novelty, say, of the weird and heavily painted critters positioned like garden gnomes in Klara Kristalova’s forest glade.
Gigantism prevails. Huge installations, muckle forms, massive blocks of clay. The largest work here is a ceramic facsimile of a giant squid (the Architeuthis), which can grow to 14 metres long. Until comparatively recently, it was only ever seen as a carcass washed up on a beach. This is exactly how the artist David Zink Yi presents his immense facsimile, as a dead creature on the gallery floor, its surface marbled like some exquisite Florentine paper. But this feat of recreation is undermined, somewhat, by the pool of ink seeping around it, which resembles nothing so much as Halloween goo.
The tide turns in reverse with the most delicate installation, titled My Place Is the Placeless, by the Iranian-born artist Shahpour Pouyan. This is a floating horizon of beautifully inventive domes, roofs and minarets, all of them miniature inventions, but all of them speaking to the architecture of real worlds. Royal palaces, mosques, office blocks, tiny shacks – all are presented on the same level, the same scale and in the same earthly material.
Pouyan began working on the piece after taking a DNA test that revealed an ancestry stretching far beyond Iran, to 33 countries. My sense is that his piece is a subtle argument against nationalism, theocracy, feudalism and race, replacing these tyrannical structures with those formed of humble clay.
• Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1 until 8 January
