A material once filed under craft becomes serious sculpture at the V&A, the institution with the longest argument about where that line falls.
V&A South Kensington surveys clay as sculpture from the 1980s to today in Sculpture in Clay, opening on Saturday 29 May 2027. The show opens the week after the Chelsea Flower Show closes.
For most of its history clay was treated as the lesser material: useful, domestic, gendered and filed under craft. It was shown in the ceramics gallery rather than the sculpture court.
In the last 20 years clay has moved to the centre of contemporary sculpture. Artists came to it because of that hierarchy, and its ties to the hand, the kiln and the accident are the point.
Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize with pots in 2003. Magdalene Odundo’s vessels now sell as sculpture, and potters who spent 40 years in the craft section have been reclassified around them.
The V&A holds one of the great ceramics collections in the world and the longest institutional argument about where the line between art and craft falls. That makes it the obvious place for this show, and the least neutral.
Work by Jacqueline Poncelet, Antony Gormley, Edmund de Waal and Clare Twomey traces how far the material has travelled from the craft section.