Sculpture in Clay opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 29 May 2027.
Clay has spent most of its history being treated as the lesser material — useful, domestic, gendered, filed under craft rather than art, and shown in the ceramics gallery rather than the sculpture court. That has changed sharply in the last twenty years. Some of the most serious sculpture being made anywhere is now made in clay, by artists who came to it precisely because of the hierarchy, and the material’s associations with the hand, the kiln and the accident are the point rather than the limitation.
The V&A has one of the great ceramics collections in the world and the longest institutional argument about where the line between art and craft falls, which makes it the obvious place for this and the least neutral. Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize with pots in 2003 and the argument has not been the same since; Magdalene Odundo’s vessels now sell as sculpture, and the potters who spent forty years in the craft section have been reclassified around them.
Sculpture in Clay opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 29 May 2027. No closing date or ticket price has been published. It opens the week after Chelsea closes, at the point in the year when the museum’s galleries carry the Season’s visitors and everyone in town is looking for something to do between the fixtures.