As the exhibition text goes… DESIRE takes a broader reading here beyond its usual meaning of longing or attraction, it’s understood as a process of seeking, longing, and projection, a movement towards something not yet fully known. It is both the desire for something and the desire to make something.

A process of seeking and longing. The desire for something; to make something.

So what do I seek? What do I long for? What do I desire?

I desire to find ways to express a certain sense of expansiveness I feel as an artist. Since I allowed myself to play and try and explore, welcoming materials and new processes into my work, I have immensely enjoyed my time at the studio, the search for answers and my attempts at giving matter to the dreams, the visions and the ideas.

After a long and intense period of making with clay during about 10 months prior to my solo show back in March, this summer I’ve had a wax affair. I have got to know this material better, deeper, and the result is The Lost Bronze. A new project with which I desire to give visibility to the invisible labour that is required to make bronze sculptures. A process that can start with clay - clay that is then often discarded or destroyed in the process of making a mould to make a replica in wax; a process that definitely needs the presence of wax - even if this presence is then lost as the wax melts, leaving a void for the bronze to fill, for the bronze to exist. A process consequently called lost wax casting.

I long for justice. I long for those hidden, ignored or belittled to be valued and to claim the space they/we deserve. And so, this project is all about the existence of those we think we could live without, those we rarely think about, even if they/we are the foundations of all that lives and breathes, of our world.

The raw clay and wax sculptures I will be showing at Sarabande are accompanied by a digital installation you can explore on my website:

The Lost Bronze digital installation

Make sure to turn the Soundscape by Maxine Pennington on and enjoy it all!

The show opens tomorrow, Wednesday August 19 until September 4, at Sarabande Foundation in Haggerston. More details here.

A rest for the wicked

I am going on my I guess now traditional ‘Substack summer holiday’, pausing for a bit to take stock. Just as the seasons go, I’d like to have a break and recover strengths for the Autumn that will inevitably come.

See you on the other side in October ♥︎
Thanks for reading and thanks for the comments and the email replies - it always fills me with an immense joy to hear how folks connect with and respond to the posts. It encourages me to keep going. More soon… ☀️

The second part of the Sarabande Foundation’s Summer Group Show in which I am showing opens on August 18. And then I am working on various other future exhibitions and projects and foundry deadlines and emails and more emails and requests for photos and bios and and and…

So I thought I would share a few things that are keeping me going these days, in case you also are feeling a tad overwhelmed.

Here is this summer’s top picks for survival:

1. Maxine Pennington’s latest mix

I know you already know I love Maxine’s mixes and I am thrilled to be collaborating with her this summer again (watch this space!). After the bike accident I had back in June, I spent weeks not listening to much music (more on the kind of music I have been listening to on #5). And then, her latest Radio Alhara mix came out and it was like a breath of fresh air. You can listen to it here.

2. Emily Dickinson

I did a Micropoetry course on Friday last week and since then I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson. I love how, with very simple language and a beautiful straightforwardness, she touches on some very universal and important topics, making you think twice, thrice, reading over and over again.

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much - how little - is within our power

Tons of poems are available on Poetry Foundation

3. Luca Guadagnino’s movies

I guess he might be most known for ‘Call Me By Your Name’. Yet - I have recently watched ‘After the Hunt’ and ‘Queer’ which I absolutely LOVED, 10 out of 10, I would recommend.

4. Ultramarathon runner Courtney Dauwalter

As I was in the final weeks of training for the European Championships of Aquathlon and the T100 in London, studio mate George Wilkin and I bonded over sports chats. We had been at Sarabande together for months, but we used to be in different ‘wings’ of the old building so we barely saw each other. Now that we’ve moved spaces, our studios are on the same floor, just us two at the very top of the building, our little alcove, and so our paths are finally crossing.

She introduced me to ultramarathon runner Courtney Dauwalter who is one of the world’s best ultra trail runners. I have enjoyed listening to Courtney talk about the ‘pain cave’ and how she deals with discomfort and tricks her body to keep running and running for hours. When we think of training and exercise, we tend to focus solely on the body, when the greatest power is in the mind - all transferable skills we could do with in life in general. This is a good one to listen to.

5. Water cures

From the lido and the West Reservoir, to having hot baths even in the heatwave, being in water is the gift that keeps on giving for me. After the bike crash I started taking hot salt baths with gong music blasting before going to bed which had a huge (of course positive) impact on my nervous system. I will offset all that water usage somehow, I promise. But sometimes, needs must. Here is a fantastic playlist for your future home retreats.

Lake Banyoles (Girona, Spain) where we swam at the European Champs last month

Bisila 2.0

I am working on a new page on my website that will accompany the pieces I am making for Sarabande’s Summer Show. If you have visited my website before, this page will have little to do with the usual way in which I have archived or displayed my work online until now. Yes, folks, I taking the digital element of my practice up a notch this summer…

As part of it, I am going through the video footage Pete Ellis took at the studio a couple of months ago. Here I leave you a couple of clips of me working on some of my paper experiments:

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After great pain, a formal feeling comes - (372)

By Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -

First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -

I will be writing one more post in two weeks to launch my new project and then I will take a wee break until early October ☀️🙏🏾

Happy Summer! xx

Such a weird thing to say, presumptuous even, given that I did not get close to bronze and definitely did not fully understand the process of casting bronzes until last year when I went to Benin City in Nigeria (more on this here).

By ‘I started working with bronze’ I mean I started going to a foundry (The South London Foundry in Brockley - now one of my favourite places in London) to deliver works in wax to have them casted in bronze. Bronzes that I would then pick up months later. I would hold them and admire them and also feel rather distant to them as I would wonder - are they mine? For, after all, I had not made them. A strange relationship to have with a material coming from a crafts background and being used to the intimacy of working with clay. You spend a day with clay and it comes with you. In your clothes, in your fingernails, sometimes on your face. There is no such thing as ‘working with clay’ without touching it, feeling it, being it. So when ‘I started working with bronze’, I realised there are many other ways to ‘work’ with materials.

Wax sculptures at South London Foundry, August 2025

I wanted to work with bronze because it seemed like the epitome of sculpture. Rodin, Henry Moore, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lynn Chadwick. If I wanted to be a sculpture, I thought, I had to work with bronze. So I started to work with wax, a material I now adore. So different to clay. So ready so instantly. A completely different relationship to heat and permanence. Still, however much I liked it, I did not see it as the thing. It was a means to an end; a means to the good stuff. It was only when I went to Benin City and I engaged with the whole - arduous, laborious, tedious, dangerous - process of casting bronzes, also known as ‘the lost wax’, that I got to understand the wonderful role that wax has in allowing bronze to be the good stuff. A material generous enough to disappear, to melt away and be lost, in order to create the space for bronze to exist.

Moulds with wax sculptures melting in the fire, Benin City, March 2025

My time in Benin opened the door to a new way of engaging with bronze. One more conscious, perhaps. As I became aware of all the invisible labour that makes those sculptures we admire possible, I connected to that part of the process and to the humble materials - clay and wax - that to me truly are the good stuff. So I am working on a new project and it won’t be the wax that is lost, but the bronze, in an attempt to give visibility to the magic we oversee, all the hard work that is shadowed by the end result. More soon…!

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This project will be exhibited at Sarabande Foundation’s Summer Show, ‘DESIRE: The Anatomy of Looking’. A two-part group show presenting the culmination of our residencies at the Foundation. I am part of Part 2 that opens on August 19th.
More information here.

On other news…

I am thrilled to share that my piece B60, which had its moment on this Substack in October last year, has been shortlisted for the Officine Saffi Award in Milan! ♥︎
Wish us luck!!! xx

Amongst many different things, the Primus pieces are a metaphor to how we think we are whole vessels. Alas, as we walk through life we start breaking apart, flopping, falling. Trauma, heartbreaks, disappointments. And so, I’ve learnt that life is nothing other than the art of learning to keep going, keeping a strong stance and our life force alive, while holding all those cracks, all that wonderful vulnerability that makes us human.

And then I left them hanging.
Tethered, dependable,
balancing groundedness
with lightness.

Photos from The Palace at 4am - a group show at Sarabande Foundation. More info here.

I’ve been making, albeit slowly because of life circumstances, studio moves and physical ailments.

I’ve been thinking about invisible labour and love and generosity in the sculpture process.

I’ve been exploring how to bring the materials I work with together in one project, through their presence and absence.

I’ve been focusing on the process itself, as it is where the effort goes, what we often don’t get to see and, consequently, fail to appreciate.

Questions that I once heard in a conversation with writer NourbeSe Philip and that got stuck in my head as they were, as they are, extremely relevant to this vision I now have.

We make
We create

And then
What’s lost? Why? At what cost?

Clips by Pete Ellis. Mix by Maxine Pennington. Photos by me.

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The Palace at 4am

If in London, a new group show is opening at Sarabande this week:

Bringing together the work of 17 Sarabande artists-in-residence, The Palace at 4am explores tensions between seduction, desire and restraint, compression and release, and emergence and withdrawal. Tightly bound form and constriction are placed in dialogue with more open, atmospheric states, creating a charged rhythm across the exhibition.

The show marks the opening of Sarabande Foundation’s new Tottenham studios and will be open from June 26 to July 1. More information here.

I will be presenting ‘old’ pieces displayed very differently to explore other ways of showing my works that feel a bit more experimental and less plinth-based… 👀

A while ago Karina told me she would like to know more (read about) how being a triathlete reflects on or influences my creative practice and since then I’ve been thinking about it, on and off, and telling myself - I will write about it in the summer when I’m in the middle of the season. Which is now.

Trigger warning: This piece is a tad inconclusive, so please see it more as a brain dump!

Encouraged by Karina’s request, I am reading a book I had been wanting to read for a while. Alas, it is written by a man so I have been postponing it and postponing it. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I kind of knew what to expect as different people had told me about the book, but I did not expect to love the book this much. I have about 20% left to read, so this statement might change in the next week. For now, what has struck me the most is the fact that he (kind of) says he writes because he runs.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? (…) I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different.

So what about me?

Since I started the book I have been having a bunch of conversations with other friends and runners which has been helpful to reflect upon my relationship with triathlon and what it brings to my life - creatively and otherwise. Six days a week I wake up and train - weights, running, swimming, cycling. I don’t question it. Of course, some days I would rather stay in bed. Some nights, I would rather stay up with friends, drinking. However much at odds with myself I sometimes feel, the purpose is clear. I want to feel well, I want to perform well. For eventually, I like winning races, let’s face it. I am an Aries. I grew up competing (in basketball) and I am a competitive person. A competitiveness that for a while I didn’t know how to channel well. I envied others, I wanted their success, especially in a professional/creative context, which only made me feel miserable and unsatisfied. With the years I have learnt to turn that desire to do better for myself, an inward looking, blinkers on - so to speak -, working with what I have and its potential, while cultivating beautiful friendships and being supportive to others. Which is what I love about triathlon the most, perhaps.

On Saturday I raced at Blenheim Palace, the first triathlon of the summer - and a busy one triathlons-wise. Before we started, as we were being briefed next to the water, wetsuits on, googles on, hats on, the MC told us: now it is the moment when you go from individual to participant to competitor. Look around you and hug the person next to you, because from now on, as the race starts, you will be in it together. Such beautiful energy to bring to a race start. I am part of a team, Women in Tri UK - a charity helping more women get into swim, bike, run and triathlons by removing barriers and making the sport more accessible - and nothing brings me more joy during a race than seeing other team members (regardless of whether I know them or not) wearing the WIT trisuit and screaming: Women in tri!!!! All smiles, all cheers.

To me, triathlon means pushing myself - mentally and physically - to keep discovering what my body can do. I compete against myself and at the same time I am there for others and learn from others.

Some races are not great despite all the training. Some swims are extremely tough and I think I have swum so fast but then I check and I was swimming so low. Some days I cannot cycle as fast as I would like to, my legs having a mind of their own. And yet, I keep going. I trust the process and believe in myself. Every single year I have at least one injury. I am hypermobile and it is just the way my body is, something that has taken me a long, long time to accept. The knee, the hamstrings, ankles, calves… from the waist down I never know what might go wrong when. Another reason to be more strategic and more respectful towards my body. When I was in therapy, I had affirmations I created for myself each week, which I had to repeat ten times a day until the following session. One of my favourites, which I still use today is:

Amo, respeto y doy gracias a mi cuerpo, porque mi cuerpo soy yo
I love, respect and am grateful for my body, because my body is me

Resilience, focus, determination, self-discipline, self-awareness, self-respect.

All values that I bring - I hope I do! - into my practice, especially working with clay. A material with a life of its own. I do something and it may or may not go well after the firing. There are no guarantees. So if it doesn’t work out, off I go again. As a craft, it is a repetitive process, the same gestures being performed over and over again to create a piece (mainly if throwing or coiling), just as I do the same exercises over and over again to ensure that I am strong enough to then run without breaking apart. Just as I do laps and laps at the VeloPark or run the same route day after day. Still, no matter how much dedication and patience, things can always go wrong and do go wrong. And off we go again, back to the starting point, another rehab, another training block. With love and care and joy.

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The joy… ah the joy… so easy to forget - at least in my case. Last week, I attended the launch of the merger of two law firms. What started as a rather dry event with one of the leaders of this newly created firm talking about the merging process blah blah blah, then, in an unexpected plot twist, became an incredibly inspiring evening. Jill Scott (footballer and England player) and Gabby Logan (TV host) jumped on the stage and started talking about their careers. I was particularly touched by Jill’s recounting of her feelings of inadequacy - imposter syndrome - each time she would be about to get on the pitch with the England national team, despite the fact that she played 161 games for England in her career. Each time, she would look around her and be amazed by the players she was about to play with. How lucky she felt. She would turn that self-doubt into her engine, remembering what she was good at and why she was there. And as a result, enjoying each and every game.

We live in an extremely competitive world where we are sold that the opportunities and resources available out there for us as artists (and humans in general) are limited. An artist needs more shows, needs to sell more, more press, more awards. It is so easy to fall into comparison and resentment, but those feelings can be transformed when the perspective is shifted. When we remember to work hard for ourselves, and not against everyone else. When we remain grateful. Like being part of group shows and having that Jill Scott feeling of wow - I get to exhibit with these people, which only makes me better.

This summer I will be competing at the European Championships as a Team GB Age Grouper, a competition that funnily enough is taking place in Spain. A childhood dream come true, for year after year of my teenage basketball career I would not make it to the regional team, always waiting in the waiting list. I know that every time I received those disappointing letters I would feel totally devastated. But I kept playing. I cannot remember what my parents must have told me, what I must have told myself to continue feeling motivated to keep trying. But I guess that energy is now part of my DNA. The perseverance.

So as you can imagine, I have been training a lot lately. I want to do very well and have the best time, enjoying the atmosphere, my family support as they will be there, and my body.

People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away they years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well.

I started writing this post yesterday morning. It had been brewing in my head for the last two weeks and I knew today would be the best time for it - post triathlon, about to start the next block of training before the European Champs. I sat on my sofa, got cosy under a blanket and started typing for about 40 minutes before I had to head to acupuncture. It was going to be a wonderful, restful Monday. Alas, I was hit by a car as I was cycling which derailed the whole day, but thankfully not my whole life. As it turned out, I am fine, just damaged soft tissue. A week of rest should get me up and running - literally - again. Quite a plot twist for the purpose of this piece. Just another injury in my long history of dramas of the flesh. So what next? Another set back, another rehab, a new training block to keep working to my goals. And so much to celebrate. For after all, I am nothing without all this flesh.

I’ve been in this race a few times, so I recognize a few of the other participants. As we wait for the race to start, we shake hands and chat. I’m not the type who gets along easily with others, but for some reason with other triathletes I have no problem. Those of us who participate in triathlons are unusual people. Think about it for a minute. Most all the participants have jobs and families, and on top of taking care of these, they swim and bike and run, training very hard, as part of their ordinary routine. Naturally this takes a lot of time and effort. The world, with its commonsensical viewpoint, thinks their lifestyle is peculiar. And it would be hard to argue with anyone who labeled them eccentrics and oddballs. But there’s something we share, not something as exaggerated as solidarity, perhaps, but at least a sort of warm emotion, like a vague, faintly colored mist over a late-spring peak.

All quotes from Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

At Blenheim, with Abigail (inspiring triathlete friend) and Naomi (my swimming coach who did her first triathlon on Saturday, just about to turn 60!) ♥︎ The kind of energy one can only love and wish to keep as close by as possible.

The first poems came via the readings for the On Black Study seminar led by Ishy Pryce-Parchment I was part of in Madrid.

We read Dionne Brand

From Inventory

I was recommended to read NourbeSe Philip

From She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

I was particularly touched and impacted by NourbeSe Philip’s poems on language, racism and the painful process of understanding and shaping her experiences using a language - English - that was never hers as a Caribbean woman in Canada.

English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish
—a foreign anguish.

She writes on Discourse on the Logic of Language. A poem she dissects on this interview on the Commonplace Podcast. (Thank you, Nina! ♥︎) Head to minute 39:54 to be swept away by the softness of her voice as she gives rhythm to her words.

I have a million thoughts on using English as a non-native English speaker to make sense of one’s (ours, my) existence. Last week, I run a workshop at the V&A East on writing. A first for me. I used to teach pottery a lot for many years, which made me develop a profound rejection of teaching. So for this special event, I chose not to teach, but simply to share my relationship to words and create a space for others to join me. After an introductory talk about my practice, different participants at different times asked me if I write in Spanish, which I don’t do and even worse - some would think -, I find quite challenging. It may sound odd it being my mother tongue, but at the end of the day I live in England, my life is in English, I mostly consume culture in English and I mostly read in English. My identity has been shaped here, in the UK, in English. I became aware of my black womanhood reading Angela Davis about a decade ago and since then, it’s been through the black British experience that I’ve made sense of mine. Travelling and sharing in English while travelling.

“In the vortex of New World slavery, the African forged new and different words, developed strategies to impress her experience on the language. The formal standard language was subverted, turned upside down, inside out, and even sometimes erased. (…) Most of these ‘techniques’ are rooted in African languages; their collective impact on the English language would result in the latter being, at times, unrecognizable as English. Bad English. Broken English. Patois. Dialect. These words are for the most part negative descriptions of the linguistic result of the African attempting to leave her impress on the language”.

More NourbeSe Philip on TheAbsenseofWritingorHowIAlmostBecaseaSpy

While my connection to English has little to do with that of the Africans NourbeSe Philip is referring to, I cannot help but make connections to my use of it, for it surely is a tad demonic, broken, bad. I keep learning and improving (I hope!), but reading NorbeSe Philip’s reflections has validated my faulty use of English as the main channel to express myself and connect; to add depth to my practice.

On some book somewhere on my bookshelf, Ursula K. Le Guin invites us to invent words. Something that, despite no longer remembering where or when I read it, got stuck in my head. And then I read these words by none other than Elif Shafak:

So I wonder - is poetry my preferred genre sometimes as it gives me an added freedom to the freedom I already feel writing in English thanks to the distance I feel both consciously and unconsciously? I don’t know, but it might make sense. Some people argue that doing therapy in a foreign language, in a foreign country, can allow us to access spaces and dark corners we would not dare go to or even realise they exist in our mother tongues. And art, after all, is therapy.

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Some pics from the workshop at the V&A East last week ♥︎

Thanks for reading!
Bisila x

*

A close up from Dumile Femi’s Hector Pieterson (1987) currently on display at Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. That artwork is a like a secondary act, the main one being the African Guernica, which was painted by Femi twenty years prior in 1967.

After a very comical series of scenes that saw us entering the museum, leaving it to drop the bags in the cloakroom across the patio, the security woman asking me to gift her my pound coin as ‘you don’t need it’ said she ‘but I don’t live here so I do need it’ said I, entering the museum, leaving it for one to smoke while another one went to get our tickets across the patio, entering the museum for a third and last time and up the stairs, still getting acquainted with each other, new friends, to the second floor walking past artworks I had seen before but they had not following the steps of the one who fetched the tickets, a seeming leader, a father, a community organiser in action, who jokingly replied ‘I can smell where they are’ when I asked why he was so certain of his steps across the rooms of a museum he was not familiar with, albeit he knew he smelt it indeed and we arrived. On one side, El Guernica. On the other, the African one.

If we begin with Michel Foucault as our primary methodological and theoretical frame — if Foucault is our referential scaffolding— we will, most certainly, draw Foucauldian conclusions writes Katherine McKittrick on Dear Science and Other Stories. She reflects upon ‘referencing, sourcing, and crediting’ as a way to take us outside of ourselves in the process of thinking or creating knowledge. Going outside of ourselves as in unhinging ourselves, unknowing ourselves, to open ‘up a different conversation about why we do what we do, here, in this place, that despises us’, to create, together, in community, collectively, ‘unexpected intellectual conversations’.

And still, displacing the self, unknowing who we are, is awful: it is indeterminate and unpredictable and lonely.

Amen, sister.

So there I was in front to Femi’s artwork, analysing it to find the similarities to the artwork, turning around to revisit a painting I must have seen a million times, El Guernica. So there I was going through the lines on the curatorial text I had just read the one introducing the display where it said that it is unknown who gave Femi’s piece the title. Was it him? Was it the gallery? We don’t know, but as far as the curator was concerned, Femi had not rejected it and so are we encountering it as it is shown outside of South Africa for the first time ever. Has it been noticed because of the title? Because of the reference to the artwork? Is that how we the West can understand it, connect to it, appreciate it? And my mind kept going back to McKittrick. She says:

Sara Ahmed makes the very smart observation that citation practices are gendered and racialized. Citation decisions are a political project for Ahmed because, she argues, absenting white men (from our bibliographies, references, footnotes) reorganizes our feminist knowledge worlds. By excluding white men from her (our) bibliographies she (we) can generate new ideas and chip away at, and possibly break down, the walls of patriarchy that have excluded and refuse feminist ways of knowing. Decentering the citations, and thus the experiences, of white men unmakes a scholarly system that champions and normalizes white patriarchal scholarly traditions.

Amen, sister.

I have no issue with Femi. I found it funny or interesting or good food for thought how some of the theories or conversations I had just been part of during a three-day symposium on Black Study at Reina Sofia - how we collectively shared thoughts on how we, artists and cultural workers, could find alternatives to the post-colonial Western patriarchal system of believes and ways of thinking that has been imposed on us - were being at play displayed at the very museum that had held all that thinking just until then.

Since 2016 I have read about five books by men and sometimes I am told ‘how much I am missing’ by removing men from my intellectual nourishment and oh I don’t care. How much the world has been missing by removing women, queer people and people of colour from the intellectual nourishment of our societies for far too long. I wonder. If I want to think differently to dream of a different world I cannot read white men or else I will end up thinking like them. What do you say?

what we tell each other about what we know and how to know, contain how to refuse practices of dehumanization.

She said.

Naming demands that we ask about the unnamed and honor the unnameable.

And what do we say?
Amen, sister.

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And the wheels kept turning…

After my solo show I took a break I got ill on my birthday I climbed a couple of mountains in the French Pyrenees ate a lot of cheese and some pastries; took what felt like a million trains across Spain and France to the UK to then fly back to Spain and four days later come back home, the one in London. In the meantime the V&A East opened with two of my works on display. In the meantime, a very dear friend opened her solo show in London - if you are local do not miss it! In the meantime, I got a new sofa at home, the one in London, from which I am writing so perhaps the wheels will slow dow in May.

Luckily, on Friday March 20th, right after the race to finish pieces, pack them, install and open the exhibition the previous evening, Maxine Pennington and Rachitha Seneviratne hosted an Intentions music event to mark the Spring Equinox 🌸 Sounds from different parts of the world filled the exhibition space taking us, the lucky audience, on trips of different kinds depending on our sorrows, needs and emotional states. I cried, a lot, and I believe most people did too. It felt like a warm bath, a proper reset for the soul, the heart and the mind. Much needed.

Between sobs and movements of quietude lying down on the floor, I got some unloads. I was surrounded by my works, people I love and music. I was still. I was happy. And so I felt a million presences. Energies coming to hug me, energies joining in. And so I did some writing as Maxine had left crayons and paper for the session.

Back at the studio the following Monday I recorded them on one of my little notebooks onto which I empty my brain and process experiences through writings and drawings. My playbooks. So for lack of better words to express how moved, grateful, happy, exhausted, proud, inspired and encouraged I feel at the moment after my first UK solo show, here I leave you some of those reflections.

I recommend you to follow Maxine on Soundcloud for her monthly mixes at Radio Alhara and if you miss the exhibition as much as I do, you can…

• listen to the soundscape here

• look at the collection and some beautiful installation photos here

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I am taking some time off work, the studio, London and… Substack! So no posts in April. I will be back in May 🌸
Lots of love,

Bisila x

We all have probably held a sacred object. An object to which we have ascribed a meaning or the power to heal us. An object that can allow us to dive into a different dimension, through prayer or meditation. I am thinking of a rosary, its beads walking us through lines to be repeated over and over again. I cannot remember when this happened, but once I was at a convent and we had to walk along a corridor, back and forth, while praying, a rosary in our hands, guide and anchor. I am thinking of the stones we were given by the shaman during a family constellations retreat I went to with my sister some years ago. In shamanism any object can be charged to help us, it is up to us. I am thinking of el pilar in the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in my home tome, Zaragoza. A marble pillar of which only a small section is accessible to us, human beings of flesh and bones, a little bit lower than average height, perhaps, so that most of us have to kneel down and kiss it. Its surface now rather hard to access as the touch of millions of lips have eroded this stone on which the Virgin once appeared to St. James the Greater.

Objects galore across religions and cultures. Objects crafted. Objects carrying both their sacred meaning and the mastery of the maker, one we rarely know.

It is from those objects that I draw inspiration when I make objects to have casted in bronze. The few I know, the thousands I will never. Most of them I call them goddesses, for to me they are guides that teach me about my own making, about the intuitive gestures and the textures I am to express. It all started with porcelain after a visit to multi-disciplinary artist Marcia Michael’s home studio. This was years ago. She contacted me as she, a renown photographer whose work I love and had seen at Autograph, had started working with clay. The pieces she showed me where exactly what I needed to see - proper downloads from somewhere else, her ancestors, her angels. We talked about the works, she cooked for me and as soon as I left her home I rushed back to the studio to make. Three minutes per object, porcelain as the chosen clay, a chance to create something without thinking. Marvelled at what I had created, I started a ritual. Each time I got to the studio, I made these studies in porcelain, to get into the mood, to learn about my own making and feel guided. A ritual that changed my practice.

And from those, the first waxes were born, and from those, the first bronzes. I have not shown works in bronze that much, so I am really excited to have a selection I am well proud of at Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul), my solo show opening this week at OmVed Gardens (March 20-29).

Photos of the bronzes by Christian Cassiel

As you can imagine, I have tons of those studies in porcelain now and as someone who hates accumulating things, it is not ideal. Fortunately, this accumulation of special little objects charged with my energy have allowed me to start a different ritual. Whenever someone I love moves houses, has something special going on in their lives, or deserves a ‘thank you’ from me, I gift them one as a little totem. A protector. For that’s all we seek for, after all, to be protected, don’t we? To know that we are not alone, that our fates are in the hands of a higher something, power, divinity, that makes our existence less arduous, more meaningful. A presence that is often simply manifested in those around us. I love that idea from shamanism that anything can be a ‘charged guide’. And if we think about it, we all are sacred, so perhaps all we need is to be more aware of our own energy and power to heal, and share it. That is, our own ability to love and through that love, protect us all.

Photos by Karina Smagulova (2022)

Thanks for reading! xx

Fast forward a year and a half later, that solo show is opening in about two weeks, on March 19th. Alas, it is not called ‘In the thick of it’, but Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul). A name that might sound familiar to those who have been reading me for the last year, as it is the title of the installation I built in Ikise, during a residency at G.A.S. Foundation.

And why that name in the first place? Why in Yoruba? One of the things that I loved the most about Nigeria is the way different religions and belief systems (seem to) cohabit. So that first Ile Ọkàn was an homage to that wealth as well as an invitation to anyone to go into the shrine/altar/temple I created, regardless of their believes, to share and be in community.

I had many doubts about keeping the name lest it would be seen as cultural appropriation as this new shrine/altar/temple is in London, decontextualised to a degree. When I asked a good Yoruba friend about my linguistic conundrum she told me, it is just another language, we always use Latin, Greek and other languages to title our creations… it is OK. Cultural appreciation instead, I guess.

And so Ile Ọkàn remained ♥︎

I am equal parts excited and terrified, as you can imagine. This show has been in my brain and fingertips for a long, long while…

The Liberations pieces have been in the making for about four years.

I made the prototypes for the bronze sculptures in Benin City (Nigeria) last year working with Ohi during an intense two-week residency with Angels & Muse when I got to visit the Benin’s Guild of Bronze Casters and dive into the material’s history.

I started working with the Baney Clay back in 2020 and now the last few pieces of this collection of 60 vessels will be shown and hopefully, they will find a new home to bring beauty to.

And the newest objects in my life, the stools, however fresh and playful, are the embodiment of all the knowledge and skill I have gathered since I started making, as I have used a myriad of techniques to create them. From all the learnings from my days making mugs, attaching handles; to my latest explorations with sculpture, working from solid masses of clay — explorations that have seen many a disaster in the kiln in the last few months…! But that’s how we learn!

So much, so much, is going onto this show and I cannot wait for it to be ready. I cannot wait to come out of the thick of it, at least this thick of it.

There will be sound, there will be research materials, there will be photography and there will be a book. My third publication this time designed by the one and only Samar Maakaroun and her team at Pentagram. For yes, I mean business, my friends!

For those of you based in London or the UK, the show will be open to the public from March 20 to 29. A short period of time for a show that is containing so much —I’d like to think. So don’t miss it!

For those of you in other geographies, I will do my best to document it all and continue sharing, as I get into the thick of my next endeavour, which has already rather fully shaped in my brain.

Here I leave you some more beautiful photos by Christian Cassiel who visited the studio in January to immortalise some of the objects that will be exhibited. ♥︎

I had never had so many different people feeding into and contributing to a project of mine, which makes me feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by such talented humans who also love my work. A big thank you to all of them: Maxine Pennington (sound), Samar Maakaroun (graphic identity & book design), Darius Enache (graphic design), Ohi Ohiwerei (bronze master), South London Foundry (bronze casters), Christian Cassiel (photography), Seedarchives (research materials), Ben Swift (endless amounts of patience with my plaster experiments at Morley College), Nieves Noha (my curator, as well as my sister) and Claire Pearse (gallerist and champion since 2018).

It takes a village!

Primus V

Baney Clay B60 - the very last one ♥︎

Goddess

Altar ring

Water jug

Someone recently told me I was ‘very gallopy’ (🐎). This person meant it in a romantic way, as in, I get on my fantasy and here we go, my fantasy and I, galloping towards the horizon. And I am gallopy (🐎) indeed. And that is the biggest challenge for me. To manage this wild, deep desire to gallop; to tame the burning fire inside; to adjust to others’ speeds; to be patient and accepting. In a nutshell, to hold my horses (🐎).

I am sorry about the emojis, but also I am not — what can I say, the emoji vibe has been unleashed.
Blame it on the fire.
Blame it on the horse.
(🔥🐎)

Perhaps I lack a lot of patience in my personal life sometimes, and perhaps it is because I give it all to the clay, to the materials, to the creative process. I am an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation and each week we have visitors doing walk throughs. Gallerists, collectors, patrons, you name it. They go studio after studio listening to us talking about our practices. One of the visits last week was by a lovely gallery owner that, when I was telling her about how different I can be compared to the requirements of a material like clay (slow, gentle, patient), she looked at me and said: what a strange choice of material then, why would you do that? Fair. One the one hand, I believe that the material chose me via the friends in London who recommended me I gave it a go when I moved here. On the other, I know it is one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had. It’s changed me.
It’s also a work in progress, let’s not kid ourselves (🔥🐎).

Photo by Christian Cassiel (Instagram)

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For the last four years I have been developing a new body of work. On and off, as I have been making these pieces at Morley College. Titled Liberations, these plaster and clay sculptures are the depiction of that tension (🔥🐎). Like I want to break free, but I am pulled back by the past, the pain, by others’ needs, by the things that shaped me. We all feel like this sometimes, I guess, and I touched upon this also on the post from January 6. Those of us who want to gallop and find our true selves and live it all, hungrily, often feel that tension with the things that are holding us down/back. Things that are also teaching us, though. Things we must experience however tedious, painful and relentless they might feel. That’s the lesson. And so we are constantly trying to balance it all. And so we float, perhaps. An orbiting exercise, looking for our own flow albeit somehow necessarily tethered.

Plaster is the opposite to clay, I find. It changes consistency fast so I need to be in the moment and just be playful. I have a tendency to make pieces that first require a very long slow process, by which I mean I would make full (‘finished’) shapes and even fire them, to then quickly ‘destroy them’, by which I mean to actually finish them — to do the decoration, to sculpt them. Like in the case of the Ignis pieces, my first collection mixing plaster and clay (pic below). The clay piece is fired and then in about three-four minutes the plaster goes on and if it goes wrong… well, sayonara.

I liked those pieces but they still felt kind of tamed and static. So through a lot of experimentation and trial and error and balloons covered in plaster exploding on my face, I arrived at Liberations. A loop that sees one material create the other and while each one of them have their own identity, the connection is so strong that they are forever tethered, no matter how much they might wish to be set free.

I thought today, as this new year begins, was the perfect occasion to first show one of them to the world.

Happy galloping! 🔥🐎

Photos by Christian Cassiel

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🐎 Free the horses 🐎

This week is also the beginning of a series of events and exhibitions that will see me galloping around until the end of March. Here you have some dates for your diary:

• Today opens ‘Black Atlantic Makers: Conversations’ at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham (UK). Centred around the multi-panel, woven and embroidered Tapestry of Black Britons, the show includes pieces by Black makers represented within the four material areas of the Crafts Study Centre’s collections - ceramics, wood, textiles and calligraphy. An inter-generational dialogue emphasising both continuity and divergence among Black makers, revealing how shared histories and diasporic connections give rise to a wide range of formal and conceptual expressions within each material area.

• On Thursday February 19, I will be in Farnham for a talk at The Farnham Pottery.

• It is that time of the year again and Collect Art Fair will be on next week, from Wednesday February 25 to Sunday March 1. This will be the fifth (!!) consecutive year I am showing work at Collect and it’s going to be an exciting one as I have works with two galleries: Thrown and House of Bandits (Sarabande Foundation gallery) (🔥)

• To mark International Women’s Day, Sarabande Foundation is curating a show titled ‘All That’s Been Given’. An exploration of inheritance and the transferral of meaning and matter between generations, that will be on from March 4 to March 11. You can join us via this link.

• And then… a big one opens on March 19th, but I shall hold my horses for now… Watch this space!

Photo by Christian Cassiel

Along with the infamous stories of me smuggling clay from one continent to another, I have also collected fun anecdotes of me getting stools through security at airports, or getting them packed in-situ and checked-in for free. As I keep recommending people, all it takes is a balanced mix of sass, assertiveness and cuteness. And all doors shall open for you.

I have stools from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal and Ethiopia. A small collection I am hoping to keep growing as I keep travelling. I have not been to Ethiopia, just yet, but my friend Christian introduced me to the fabulous world of the Spitafields Market sellers this summer and I got one of my favourite stools ever. It had to be done.

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Around this time last year, I met Fiyin Koko in Lagos who very generously welcomed me in her home and studio. We spent a lovely morning drinking her delicious homemade teas, getting to know each other and making small stools. The maquettes of our dreams. I fell in love with the two little cute stools I made. Shapes that simply came out of my fingers, an amalgamation of shapes I had worked with in the past and the endless shapes and textures I had been seeing during my first weeks in Nigeria and the prior two months in Senegal. We never fired those, but I carried them with me as I went from city to city, from country to country and more recently, from studio to studio.

I made some larger maquettes, or rather tests, during my time at Thread in Senegal and as soon as I got back to London last summer I knew I had to properly bring those to life. Using those first maquettes as inspiration, as well as the stools I could find in the fantastic book collection at Seed archives, I have created a collection of four stools. Different shapes, designs, textures, concepts and clays. Some are closer to vessels from my past, some are closer to the sculptures I wish to make one day. Decorated with beads from Benin City (Nigeria), interpretations of the different ways in which stools can be carried in different countries, and the mere traces of my fingers’ commands. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed making anything as much as I have loved (and still do, for there are more on their way…) creating these stools.

No other objects I have ever made have made me feel the amount of awe and excitement and joy that these provide. To the extent that, sometimes, I cannot believe I have made them. They have an identity and a character, so strong and particular, that they somehow feel like objects sent to me, rather than made by me. Perhaps that’s what it is. I do hope that’s what it is.

Can you sit on them? Is the first question people ask me when I talk about them or show them to them. Of course you can! I reply as I proudly demonstrate it, a big smile on my face. Proud mother. Proud lover. Proud admirer.

Some of these will be first shown at Collect Art Fair (February 25 to March 1). More opportunities to see them will follow, as well as new iterations.

Photo by Christian Cassiel

Each collection within the project has so far comprised of about 20 pieces, each of a different shape and a different mix of clays. Vessels that were born out of my hands as the wheel spun. Intuitive making, subconscious making, driven by all the images seen on books, all the pots seen being made, pots touched, pots loved.

Each pot unique. Some whiter made with higher percentages of porcelain or white stoneware (what I call the ‘good clays’); some darker, the Baney clay (the ‘bad clay’) more present. The higher the amount of Baney clay in the mix, the more dramas in the result. From bloating to cracks due to having pushed this African earthenware to higher temperatures, as well as due to both clays having been forced to coexist despite their molecular disparities.

My first observations were about the metaphors behind those cracks and ‘faults’. A clash of civilisations. How immigration is accepted, how ‘darker beings’ from the Global South are welcomed, but only to a certain extent. Only if they/we assimilate.

From Baney Clay Part 4, photo by Maxine Pennington

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Since 2020 when I made the first iteration and as more and more of these pieces have been exhibited and sold, I have made another observation that is still connected to those initial reflections and the concept behind the project. It turns out —according to the anecdotal data I’ve collected— that the pieces that generally take longer to sell are the darker ones. The ones with more ‘bad clay’, the more ‘Southern’ ones, the blacker, the more African. Funny, is it not? That the material experimentation to open a conversation about race and perception and the Western gaze on art and its history is then ratified by its reception. Kind of silently. But I was paying attention.

Because I like to be contrarian, as the baby that was pushed to leave my mother’s womb to be born that I am, I have chosen to now mostly work with black clay. Before my go-to clay was terracotta to honour the work of the women who have historically been belittled, ignored or forgotten. Now, I am still choosing blackness, just more literally.

The black clay that I use is rather coarse, with a lot of grog, so that it is easier to coil with is. So that —I hope— the shapes are more resilient and I can push them as trouble-free as ceramics can be (so really not trouble free at all, but you get me). It is a horrendous clay to throw with though, and all of my larger vessels are always first thrown and then handbuilt. The sides of my hands burn due to the friction of the little particles of grog against the wheel head as the pots spin. Yet it is worth it and my skin seems to heal fast enough. I guess the clay itself heals it afterwards as I keep on making.

This week I am showing the first Primus piece made with black clay (Primus V below) at the London Art Fair.

Primus V (2025)

A couple weekends ago doing a photoshoot with my dear and talent friend Christian Cassiel, I asked him to choose his favourite piece. He chose the darkest one of the whole lot. I told him about this research of mine and how glad I was that he loved the blackest vessel the most. He looked at me as though he was not entirely convinced by this story I was telling him, or maybe he simply was catching up with the reflections I had been having for a long time. After a moment of pause he said, well, I just love all things black. And so do I.

*Baney Clay Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

A disclaimer on black clay

I must confess I have not done the other research yet: I don’t know the composition of this industrial clay I am using and something inside me tells me it is not going to be cute. So apologies if anyone reading is aware of this and therefore rolling their eyes at this story, for I might be complicit in other societal and global disasters by way of using this clay. I have to do this other research — it’s coming!

Lastly, if you are in London…

Pop by the London Art Fair this week. More details here.

On Friday I will be part of talk about ‘Material Meaning and the Unexpected’. A conversation with artist Emily Ponsonby, chaired by Len Gordon, to explore how material choices can carry cultural memory, personal narrative and conceptual intent.

1:30 - 2:30pm Talks Theatre, Business Design Centre, Islington, N1 0QH

For the last three years, I have been developing a body of work that touches on this: on the tension between that which shapes us and our urge to break free from it. To shape ourselves. A tension that is met with a gravitational pull towards the past, the pain, the experiences that are part of us, even if we want them to disappear. It can be a heartbreak or a painful break-up. It can be the disjointed reality of those of us who migrate, or maybe without physical or geographical movement, leave our ‘homes’ behind.

I have just finished a wonderful book titled The Island of the Missing Trees. A beautifully written piece of historical fiction by Elif Shafak, who’s already featured on this Substack as I’ve become a big fan of hers in the last three or so months. Placed between London and Cyprus, the book is about war, love, loneliness, generational trauma and trees, specifically, a fig tree which also is one of the narrators. At some point it says…

“After all, the world is full of immigrants, runaways, exiles… encouraged, you break free and travel as far as you can, then one day you look back and realize it was coming with you all along, like a shadow. Everywhere we go, it’ll follow us, this city, this island.”

Spanish writer, philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado brings the lives and experiences of migrants, stray dogs (particularly those in Athens) and trans folks to the same level on An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing. Stories of transgression and deviancy; third experiences. I am writing about the book out of memory as I read it years ago and I don’t have it here, I have it at home. Wasn’t I home? Anyone challenging the boundaries of the cis-hetero-techno-scientific capitalist system is a migrant, a threat to the status quo that consequently needs to be ostracised, criminalised and persecuted.

“We are in the waiting room of the world and it is expanding (for migrants, for people between identities). We are waiting. You exist but you don’t have a political existence.”

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Following one of my sister’s pieces of advice today I made my own lunch. I rebelled against the grip of the Castilian-mother-cook system of power and control. No, I don’t want any more meat. No, I don’t like ham, which doesn’t seem to land on some of my aunts’ brains as I am asked the exact same thing year after year. ‘Are you vegetarian now then?’ Didn’t I answer that question already, several times? And it seems that that makes me less Spanish, less comprehensible, more foreign, more alien. So so be it then. I am home, or am I not? I’m an expat on home soil.

Last night, on January 1st, after the delicious New Years Eve feast of seafood followed by, of course, some meat, and then the copious New Year’s late lunch on a day when perhaps most human beings want peace and quiet, the matriarchs started preparing dinner at around 8.30pm once I was done with a pottery lesson for my niece and nephews. My niece had been gifted a kids’ pottery wheel for Christmas, so I was summoned to share my knowledge, which I did joyfully after a brief moment of peace and quiet in my room, while next door in the living/dining room and still at the table, conversations were had and uncomfortable naps were taken —the classic fist on the forehead à la ‘The Thinker’ by August Rodin. So as the matriarchs set off to the kitchen to start preparing for the next (and last) supper, I carried out a quick survey. My dad was a tiny wee bit hungry, which he brought to life with his thumb and index finger, pretty much touching, less than a millimetre apart, barely leaving any room for the air to flow between them. The rest of the adults were not hungry, their faces clearly demonstrating that eating was indeed the very last thing they wished for that moment. And yet, as the matriarchs said, if we prepare something, we’ll eat it. Like robots with no will power, we sat at the table and ate and ate. If it is this hard to change behaviours in families, the masses following the norms, the traditions, without questioning if it is good for them, how are we going to change global systems of abuse that are rooted in centuries of exploitation and brainwashing, I wonder.

And then, those who rebel are the problem, the outcasts. And we go home and we don’t feel at home for we cannot be ourselves. And we go to the other home and something is amiss.

“The crossing is the place of uncertainty, of non-evidence, of the strange. And this is not weakness, it is a power."

Paul B. Preciado, ‘An Apartment on Uranus’

‘I didn’t want to start the year like this’, I told my sister, to which she said, ‘maybe that’s exactly how you needed to start year’. Exactly what another friend said after I had messaged her to report on my January 2nd state of affairs. Another friend I also messaged said —quoting someone else—, ‘even this will come to pass’.

And as Elif Shafak says in The Island of the Missing Trees…

Some day this pain will be useful to you.

I hope more and more people keep rebelling in 2026, keep challenging the status quo, however that might look like to each one of us. Starting in February, it is the year of the Fire Horse, a rare and powerful event that occurs only once every 60 years, Gemini said. A “double fire” energy year —freedom, passion, transformation and bold action.

When my sister started telling me about how the reason I felt like shit was because I had stepped out of my square, she asked me, “so now you’ve turned around 180 degrees and you cannot see your square; what do you see?” Darkness was my answer. The lesson was to find a way to find light in that darkness, for this is where I am now; and to listen to my body to rest and reset, which, according to the Chinese Horoscope predictions for an Earth Dragon like myself, should be the focus this year lest I wanna get burn out. So I guess it is indeed how I needed to start this year.

I wish you all the best x

It will take time, renewal. It will take time, healing.

Elif Shafak, ‘The Island of the Living Trees’

A snap from parallel universe where people are blue, they smile despite the rain, the rain is kind of green and trees have blue veins. By my me of the past back in 1992.

“As long as there’s tomorrow
the sun will rise again”

I finished 2024 asking the universe for a bunch of things for 2025, one of them being ‘falling in love’. I wanted to fall in love in 2025.

As the end of the year approaches and I do my traditional reviews, I am discovering and being awed by the amount of things I have fallen in love with this year.

From new friends that brought the most special connections, conversations and moments across cities and continents; to swimming —a sport I had at times resented this year to then… bang! have the spark back, all smitten all over again.

I have fallen in love with my practice and with being in the studio, making. I have fallen in love with my mornings. The little rituals I perform in the exact same sequence each day, regardless of the location, before the daily action starts, especially during the Autumn months in London when all is dark. I have fallen in love with them so much that I often wish the day would end, to go to bed so that the morning can come back again.

And I have fallen in love with some artists and their art. Here’s a wee list.

Ranti Bam

Adebunmi Gbadebo

Ithell Colquhoun

Etel Adnan

Kerry James Marshall

Anni Albers

Lee Ufan

And speaking of love and mornings

a song:

May 2026 bring us all more love in whichever shape or form.

Thanks for reading,
Bisila xx

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“Give birth and nurture.
Give birth without possessing
and foster without dominating.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I read this some weeks ago. Freshly moved into my new studio, I would come feeling a little bit lost, weird and with not much to do. I still had vessels drying in my old studio, waiting for the final firings of the year, so I was coming to the new one feeling rather in between and without the necessary equipment to get into any real making (not that I had the energy or will for it, I won’t lie). Forcing myself to ‘do something remotely productive’, I would arrive, make a coffee and read a couple of entries from the Tao Te Ching. I guess I was hoping to feel inspired, enlightened, or simply less guilty.

Making is very much about giving birth. When I get stuck about motherhood, it gives me peace to think that my maternal energy (still not sure how much of that I have though…) is being put into good use: to create objects that people connect with, love and want to own. And there is so much more to come; so much more life to create and share.

Working with clay really requires a good dose of letting go. Of allowing the material to do its thing safely so that there’s no cracks or disasters in the kiln. I believe that in order to have a healthy relationship with the material it is key to understand that it has a life of its own —and that’s its beauty.

And so we birth without possessing.
We foster without dominating.

Water Jugs

That is why I love mixing different clays within one vessel. I do my best to visualise how the result might look like but there is always an element of surprise when the pieces come out of the kiln.

This Autumn I made two Water Jugs. One of them started tilting, as if tired, as it dried. And as we anticipated, it fell in the kiln. Respecting its new stance, the team at my old studio (who emptied the kiln in my absence) displayed it lying down and this Jug somehow makes more sense like that. Its wishes, our command.

Here I leave you some process videos and snaps of the final results. I hope you like them!

A storage jar fashioned out of clay:
absence makes the jar work.

Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

Here I leave you some:

Etel’s Leporellos

I must love my friend Karina immensely for not only have I joined her book club (even if I really don’t like book clubs); but also have read the books (or rather more accurately, 50% of the books thus far, which is an excellent performance given my track record with book clubs).

We recently read The Beauty of Light: Interviews, which, as the review says, is ‘a lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art.’

I didn’t know Etel before and I forced myself to not google her until I had finished the book. This was a fantastic idea. My favourite thing from all her ouvre are her Leporellos: consertina format paintings that meet words that meet automatic writing that meet magic. A beautiful encouragement to keep seeking for creative freedom and to keep having fun.

♥︎

On Friday I moved studios. Five years ago, I changed spaces as I wanted my practice to change. I wanted to stop making tableware, I wanted to lack the space to produce high volumes of work, to be more intentional and explore other more considerate (to me) ways of making. That lack of space I craved then became unbearable. In the last five years my practice has indeed changed, expanded, evolved — a lot. After dreaming of, praying for, and having worked towards a room of my own, I finally got it. It feels weird, I won’t lie. A door I can close to be alone? A space bigger than a meter-long desk? The possibility to be in the company of my work instead of being buried under it? A treat I am extremely grateful for.

As I enter a new chapter, I cannot help but look at the five years that have ‘just’ gone by with such tremendous speed. Inspiration comes from many sources, some conscious, some unconscious. Still, I think I could pin down what I wish for my work to be to two people: Theaster Gates & Rosalía. The former for his commitment to communities, multi-layered approach to art and love for pottery. The latter for her bravery to dive into the unknown pushing her own boundaries and those of music as an art practice. So I won’t take up too much of your time with ‘me and my own thoughts’ today. Instead, here I leave you two interviews that I find incredibly inspiring.

You are in for a treat, so I hope you find the time to watch them. Enjoy! x

*Porcelana by Rosalía, LUX

A tap tap tap
that goes round and round
Fingers that without touching talk, rule and create

Two parts
become one
A growing shape
From the 2 to the 3
the different Ds
evolving

Birthing life

A vessel that will be valued by what’s visible outside but
that cannot be held together without the intimacy of what’s inside
Just like us
a body a being a work of art
Just like us

Under my thumb
the pot goes round and round
does it know where it is going when
the only way is up
But how tall, how far?
Only the sky above
‘What are we to become?’
they may wonder
particles of soil
once in a past time

I don’t know either, pal
for the thumb has too much fun
and loves the feeling of the clay
in love with its malleable essence
always a tad scared of going too far, pushing too much
Just like us

A thumb’s dance
The clay follows
A vessel comes

Last week I fell in love

It had been a while since the last time I had loved a book so much. I would get in bed as early as possible. 8pm, 9pm. To read. To dive into the words of Elif Shafak. The wisdom of Sufi philosophy and the lives of the poet Rumi and the other characters on this beautiful, moving, inspiring and enlightening book — The Forty Rules of Love.

I was tempted to start reading it again, right after finishing it. Instead, I run to the bookstore to get another one by her ♥︎ Run now, if you can!

The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.