Phoebe Collings-James

Interview by Monica Uszerowicz

Phoebe Collings-James’s work is alive. This statement is a literal one: the London-born multidisciplinary artist has worked with clay since 2014, moved by the material’s connection to time and place and the many permutations it undergoes as the planet shifts. Clay, like the earth itself, lives. Though Collings-James never formally studied ceramics, they learned by chance that their ancestors worked in the Potteries of Stoke—a serendipitous revelation proving, they explain, “there are no accidents.” Through a tender lexicon inscribed into their work (fingerprints dipped into toros-shaped armor, a spider sketched onto yellow tissue paper, a gold orb atop a ceramic horse’s head) Collings-James explores connections like these—those that occur across time, visible or unseen—and both the vulnerability and transformative power of being, indeed, alive, and witness to a world in upheaval, full of grief and hope. Their practice is expansive, thriving beyond the studio: there’s Mudbelly, once a personal research space that is now a teaching facility offering free courses, taught by Black potters and artists, to Black students in London; Collings-James is also part of the London collective B.O.S.S., Black Obsidian Sound System, (and, as Young Nettle, is a musician themselves).

Their exhibition at Arcadia Missa last fall,“bun babylon; a heretics anthology,” featured a procession of six ceramic figures—The Infidel, The Dreamer, The Guardian, The Silo, The Cypher, the Preacher—linked by their archetypal roles in the collective unconscious and their revolutionary potential. Their details are visceral–viewing the works even from a distance, you might imagine the sounds they’d emit if they moved. Collings-James could be one of them: their palpable warmth a necessity in times like these, and in all others.

Monica Uszerowicz (MU): You just got back from Art Basel Miami Beach, having shown there for the first time with Arcadia Missa and Soft Opening. What was that like?

Phoebe Collings-James (PCJ): I was quite surprised. The first time I went there was almost 10 years ago, and it was a drastically different experience. This time, I found it to be quite calm. The fair and its presence in the city have changed over the years—also, what’s happening in Palestine, the US economy, and other events must have had an impact. If everything had just felt oblivious, that would’ve been quite a chaotic dissonance. The opportunity to see loads of artists’ work allowed me to create a space for myself. Every time I encountered works that spoke to me, I transported myself to the artist’s studio, remembering that it was an artwork and not some sort of strange, abstract object in this corporate space. I watched Ja’Tovia Gary’s new film, Quiet as It’s Kept (2023). It was quiet that morning, and I watched the film in full; it’s 26 minutes long. That grounded me.

MU: You experienced Art Basel like an art show, not a trade show.

PCJ: In moments. It was constantly shifting from one to another.

MU: I’m curious about your upbringing as an artist—especially the music you heard in your house growing up. Music is such a fundamental part of your practice. I’d love for you to wax poetic, if you will, and take me down memory lane.

PCJ: I’m really grateful for that question, because it’s oriented around music and that was my first access into art, into the possibilities of making things. My dad had a big sub in our living room. We had a tiny little house, and it made the whole house shake, especially on the weekends, when my parents were listening and cleaning. My mum would listen to Dionne Warwick on a Saturday morning; they’d both listen to Everything But the Girl. Everything But the Girl was quite iconic. I remember one long car journey to Glastonbury Festival when I was 10 or 11; it takes about eight hours to get there sometimes. I remember that CD or tape being played over and over again while my parents got increasingly more tense as they tried to figure out how to get to Glastonbury.

I’m 36, so this is the late ’90s, mid-’90s, early 2000s. They liked DMX, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Shirley Bassey. In terms of visual art—I witnessed a lot of it through photography. My dad took pictures and worked as a concert photographer alongside other jobs. I remember the Phoenix Festival, which used to be in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I remember seeing Isaac Hayes play and my dad would be in the pit; my dad put me and my sister on the side of the stage so he could see us while he took pictures. There were lots of experiences like that, which were quite unusual, I think, compared to friends we grew up with.

MU: We’re around the same age, and I have an almost identical memory, from the other side of the world, of being in the car, my parents listening to Everything But the Girl and trying to agree on directions.

PCJ: That's amazing. All of this might speak tangentially to the Art Basel conversation—it really was a different time, in terms of these experiences. I think I went to Glastonbury one of the last years before they really built the proper wall and forcefield around it. The prices were still low; my dad would get in with a press pass, I imagine, but it wouldn’t have been that much. People also used to climb over the wall or break through the fences. There was more of a squatting culture—traveler, hippie, punk culture was still more possible, in terms of the structures of cities.

With capitalism and gentrification, it’s almost completely impermeable now. There was still much more room. Even the festivals themselves were a lot smaller. They were less of a consumerist leisure activity. I’m not saying people don’t have an amazing time at Glastonbury, but festivals have completely transformed—they’re expensive and heavily branded in quite specific ways. Growing up in that time, they were still more of a weird, lefty thing to do; there were much more politics around them. They were musical connections to a way of living. I’m not saying it was a kind of utopia, but there’s quite a big shift.

MU: Even ten years ago, Art Basel wasn’t so branded, either. The world felt a little more fluid and accessible.

PCJ: Oh, yeah. I remember going to superstars’ parties that I was not invited to but somehow got into—it was big actors and music heads throwing these lavish parties, and they were fun and raucous. There’s an element of control, now, that doesn’t allow that to happen. It’s a sponsored thing; it’s very finessed and overly legible.

MU: Arcadia Missa’s exhibition at Art Basel included, among other pieces, some works from your exhibition,“bun babylon; a heretics anthology” (exhibition installation image at top of page). “Bun babylon” featured ceramic sculptures that embodied six characters and archetypes. I know you’ve an interest in mythology—Greek mythology, Caribbean mythology—and tarot, and so many of these themes are present in these figures. Could you introduce me to them? Who, for example, is The Infidel?

The Infidel, 2023

Stoneware glazed ceramic, steel base

PCJ: Unfortunately, that week came as we lost the poet Benjamin Zephaniah. He was a real figure in British Caribbean culture. He was from Birmingham, and a fixture of my childhood and among a lot of my friends and peers. He was very vocal against empire. He spoke about Palestine for decades. His poetry was read in schools. Maybe this is also speaking to your question about childhood, and the sonic space that we each grow up in.

The news of his passing—he was 65—was really sad. He was speaking about quite radical things—about poverty, about racism, about the Caribbean, about friendship and love and families—and that got through in the UK in a time that was very conservative. We were in between two recessions. My dad’s a dread, and to know that people who looked like my dad, and his friends, could also be poets, could also be vocal, was really important. It was always in my mind that he refused an MBE and was very vocal about why he’d been fighting the British Empire all his life, and why would he even consider accepting that as an award? He spoke about it in newspapers, on TV.

I’ve been thinking about how seeds get planted in your consciousness from a young age. Rather than coming into that consciousness, it was already there. I was thinking about him in terms of The Infidel figure—this person who was incredibly spiritual, who evoked Birmingham. He had a thick Brummie accent, and also spoke in Jamaican Patois. He embodied all these things from these two islands that my parents are also from—the UK and Jamaica—and stood outside of many dogmatic structures.

I’ve also been thinking about Jamaica in relation to Palestine. I only learned recently that, in 1959, Jamaica was the first African-descendant country to boycott South Africa during apartheid; they were the first worldwide, after India. I’m thinking a lot about Jamaica and the whole of the Caribbean.

"I’ve been thinking about how seeds get planted in your consciousness from a young age. Rather than coming into that consciousness, it was already there."

The Guardian, 2023

Stoneware slip ceramic

MU: The exhibition’s press release features a sentence that I thought was beautiful: “The works are seeking routes for mystic support systems, deepening connections to intuition and resistance to capitalist modes of reason.”

PCJ: I think that line was mine—my gallerist Rózsa Farkas wrote the first part of the text, which is a rare gift. We’ve been working together for so long and we were able to be in dialogue, which is reflected in what she writes.

MU: It made me think of Caribbean resistance and of Palestinian resistance—how, as we attempt to free ourselves from these systems of power, we’re all trying to deepen our connections to our own intuitions and move away from what we’ve been taught. What were you thinking about when you wrote it?

PCJ: I’m thinking about a lot of things. I’m thinking about Édouard Glissant talking about trembling. I’m thinking about people having conflicts within themselves about how much of their own voices or their own grief they might want to share, or should share, publicly—people who are not currently in Palestine under siege, who have their relative safety and comfort at the moment. I’ve been witnessing different people trying to speak about what’s happening, trying to connect the struggles that are happening globally. Even in the attempts to do that, there is some of this intuition and resonance that I was trying to speak to in that sentence.

It makes me think about people connecting the unearthing of olive trees to the killing and torture of people—and trying, through poetry, through speaking, through writing, through making art, to connect to the liveness of everything. I think it’s about connecting to an intuition and a sense of being connected to each other to be able to actually feel.

Some of these struggles are going to be outside our own lifetimes. How do you endure, potentially, for your forever? Some things will be overcome and there will be healing, but it will be ongoing. And the tools and resilience needed for that are going to be spiritual tools, ultimately, and practical tools. I think artmaking is part of that. I don’t know if it’s necessarily in the system of exhibiting art—but I think art will always have a fundamental place in this, because it’s part of the bigger idea of connecting to intuition and creation. That’s always been fundamental to moving through emotions, through grief, through love.

"Some of these struggles are going to be outside our own lifetimes. How do you endure, potentially, for your forever? Some things will be overcome and there will be healing, but it will be ongoing. And the tools and resilience needed for that are going to be spiritual tools, ultimately, and practical tools. I think artmaking is part of that."

MU: That’s so beautiful. Thank you for that. I was looking at some of your earlier pieces—the body armor and body masks featured in your 2021 show “A Scratch! A Scratch!” at Camden Art Centre. I’m touched by their details and symbolism and how you communicate through them. You utilize historical techniques and ultimately create your own visual language.

Installation view of “A Scratch! A Scratch!”

Camden Art Centre, 2021

Photo: Rob Harris

PCJ: The starting point for me is drawing: drawing to scribble my way through some of these thoughts, making sense and nonsense of things, trying to just be with the multitudes of feelings and things in my personal life—things that are more collective, that touch on what we’ve been speaking about. I worked a lot with paper, and since I’ve been focusing more on dealing with clay, drawing—drawing as a way to form language and to articulate myself—has transferred onto the clay surface. Most of my works are quite heavily adorned by my dribbles. I think of them as dribbling and scrawling.

I often use either the sgraffito technique, where I'm scratching into the clay, or I press and stamp into it with metal typing stamps or stamps made of clay. The roulette technique is something I’d been researching in relation to pottery techniques in West Africa, and then among different potters making practical water pots and vessels for cooking. Individual artists and tribes have their own signature roulette—it might be a twirl of rope or a coil from some kind of machinery or any image that, when rolled across a surface, can become a repeatable pattern. It’s quite a simple idea that gives you the ability to make a quick and highly decorated pattern on a clay surface.

I was interested in using a similar technique, but I was beginning to imprint some of the words and symbols that I found meaningful. I’d also bought some wooden roulettes from a pottery shop, which had fish on them and bats and tears—I use the tears quite often. I had these disparate references in my mind when creating my own. Some words that come up a lot are “fire” and “flood.” These are the words from Barrington Levy’s song, “Black Roses.” I made a roulette that just said “you must tend to it, water it”; at the end of that song, he says, “you must do the best you can do.”

Joy Comes With The Morning, 2021

Unglazed ceramic, polypropylene rope and speakers

MU: A few years ago, while deepening your study on ceramics and clay, you discovered that your great-great-grandfather worked in the Potteries of Stoke. I was curious about how clay came to be the medium you work with most. This ancestral connection is amazingly serendipitous.

PCJ: It’s amazing to me. I think there are no accidents. Even though I only learned about it a couple of years ago, these ancestral connections are always present and they reveal themselves in weird and wonderful ways. In terms of working with clay, its possibilities for transformation, as well as the ways in which it’s able to be inscribed, were the big draw for me—as well as its ability, up to a certain point, to constantly change. I often link it to my dad, who had a darkroom in our house when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom with the orange light on, watching the images reveal themselves in the paper. I remember being mesmerized by that process of transformation and revelation. When I went through the ceramic process, the firing process, for the first time, that was a moment of reconnection for me.

It was my mum’s great-granddad and his brothers—her great-granduncles, maybe—who worked in the Potteries in the ’20s. What’s interesting is that they would’ve been laborers. Their connection to their craft would’ve been very different. We found my great-uncle’s death certificate, and it says he died at the age of 30 or 31. They would’ve had pretty short lives, and it was quite treacherous work, going into these hot kilns, carrying huge saggers on their heads—saggers were heavy, clay-fired boxes made of stone and other aggregate materials. They contained very delicate porcelain inside, which perhaps references many metaphors for what was being protected and what wasn’t.

I was doing a lot of study, deepening my skills in ceramics and researching studio ceramics history and legacies of production in the UK. To find out that my ancestors were working in the same potteries that I was learning about was pretty wild. There are a lot of instances like this in my family. My sister and I were the first ones to go to university—and even my sixth form college, which is a bit like high school in the U.S., was a school my granddad got into. It used to be a grammar school, which he got into but couldn’t afford to pay for. I think this often happens in working-class families, where different generations have different kinds of experiences and it can feel as though there are pretty significant jumps—though in relation to capitalism, they’re not that big. Leap-frogging around a pond.

MU: I agree with you that there are no accidents. Maybe we’re always working with these invisible forces that we might not be cognizant of the entire time, but they're there.

You’re often asked to address the similarities and relationships between clay and the body, especially with regards to your body mask pieces. Clay also literally interacts with the body; you’ve talked before about how the dust irritates your lungs. Clay molds to the shape you create for it, but it can also push back. How is clay embodied for you?

The subtle rules the dense, 2021

Glazed ceramic

PCJ: Increasingly, when I'm working with it, I’m thinking about touch and how so many of the ways that I handle the clay are also ways that I handle my own or other people’s bodies. The way that touch is translated so immediately is something that is part of the psyche of working with clay—something that I enjoy being connected to and thinking through.

I didn’t study clay or ceramics in school; I studied Fine Art. I have a bit of an issue with the phrase “self-taught,” because I’m definitely not literally teaching myself. I’m learning from others. Perhaps a better phrase is “unintentionally taught.” My teachers have been friends, peers in shared spaces, instructors on YouTube, one-off courses. Now I’m at a stage where I can pretty much make anything I imagine; I have a good understanding of glaze chemistry. This is enabling me to get deeper into something that I’ve known was important for a long time: the actual recognition of the material that I’m working with, learning more about it in terms of its geology and where things are being sourced, how they're being transported, the labor chains involved.

"I didn’t study clay or ceramics in school; I studied Fine Art. I have a bit of an issue with the phrase “self-taught,” because I’m definitely not literally teaching myself. I’m learning from others. Perhaps a better phrase is “unintentionally taught.”"

PCJ: So there’s a fantasy of touch and relativity to the body, which is both real and not real. And then there’s this reality: the conditions of exploitation—of being fertile and furtive, the conditions that our bodies go through—all connect to the labor of the clay ending up on my desk. That’s a point of research I’m just at the beginning of, and I’ll begin to make more decisions in the future around that, around which materials I choose to use or not use. That’s where a whole load of ethical concerns will come in.

MU: You’re also expanding both your own studies and relationship to this material through Mudbelly. Mudbelly allows you to give this experience to others.

PCJ: Going back to the figures in “bun babylon”—The Cypher, The Silo, The Preacher—they’re all entities and energies that I’ve encountered. Some I may even embody or move through at times. They become important in terms of the way I want to live, or the ways that I think it could be most possible to survive—and that’s through working collectively and sharing and seeing the teacher-student relationship as one that is reciprocal, in motion, and in dialogue all the time.

I wanted to grow as an artist and a ceramicist and a teacher and a student, and I wasn't really finding the environments that I wanted to do that in. That’s how Mudbelly came about. I was in predominantly white studios that were mainly speaking to a very linear canon of ceramic history and knowledge. Mudbelly is still just forming. It’s open to anyone in terms of experience and age who is Black and in London, though we’ve occasionally done projects outside of London. There are always Black teachers who are artists and potters. It’s growing outward from me, from the different teachers leading the various courses, from the students. We’re all part of it taking form. I can already feel and see it growing and informing my work and how I am, in my life, in so many ways. It’s really important to me.

MU: Can you tell me more about Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.)?

PCJ: This also speaks to working collectively. B.O.S.S. is a queer, Black-led sound system. For me, it is a very nurturing counterbalance to the kind of “siloed artist/art star” narrative that the art industry pushes. It primarily pushes a “flavor of the month” relationship to artists. It might say it doesn’t, but it does. Being able to disappear into a group, and be supportive and supported in different ways, is really valuable. I like listening rather than talking all the time. I like being able to lead the group sometimes, and then just be the one who does the emails. I think this is a much truer way of organizing ourselves—when we can be much more flexible in these roles that we all need in life. Those roles are so traditionally hierarchical and top-down, and there’s a different way to take them on.

"Being able to disappear into a group, and be supportive and supported in different ways, is really valuable. I like listening rather than talking all the time. I like being able to lead the group sometimes, and then just be the one who does the emails. I think this is a much truer way of organizing ourselves—when we can be much more flexible in these roles that we all need in life."

PCJ: Collective work can be challenging, because we all have different needs, different opinions, different capacities. But sonically, it’s also amazing. We take our rig to community events. Some of the best things have been playing a voguing ball in London, playing at a friend’s live dance performance, and just generally using it as a sound system and doing other kinds of collective work around sound and making exhibitions.

MU: This question came to me as we were talking. Are you someone who can walk into a room and sense the feelings of other people? Are you an empath in that way?

PCJ: Do you know what? I think I am, but I have also learned that you don’t always get it right. I do feel very sensitive and empathic—and also aware that I just don’t know, and that we’re not to assume too much about what other people are going through or what they need. What do you think about that? What about you?

MU: I feel similarly. I can pick up on those things, sometimes to my detriment, but I sometimes interpret what I’m sensing incorrectly and presume too much.

PCJ: Yeah. I think you are rarely wrong about knowing something’s happening. When you pick up on these feelings, I think usually it means that there’s something going on. Knowing what exactly is needed is a more nuanced thing.

MU: What are you thinking about these days? Is there anything you’re reading or watching or talking about?

PCJ: I’m definitely thinking a lot about rest, mostly. How deeply can I rest and restore? I also want to make Mudbelly into an official charity and give it more structure and support so that it can continue over the next three to five years. And I am about to re-embark on finishing Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. I’m watching a lot of First Wives Club, with Jill Scott being outrageous. In terms of thinking about making things, I’m feeling very inspired from the show at Arcadia Missa. A lot came out of it, with regards to new forms and ways of working. After Miami, I really wanted to make new work. That feeling—I want to dive into it and figure out what it looks like.

Monic Uszerowicz

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer born in Brooklyn and raised in Florida. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, BOMB, Burnaway, Deem Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Pin-Up, and elsewhere, and her photographs have been exhibited throughout the US and internationally. She was a recipient of a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the short-form category; her project, Groundwater, is a (still ongoing) series of essays about artists from Florida or the Caribbean whose work addresses—or attempts to mitigate—instances of environmental injustice and the effects of the climate crisis.