A Physical Archive of Identity and Survival: Phoebe Collings-James

The exhausting reality of having to “keep your shit together”1 to survive, alongside a lingering fear of losing her mind, is a constant concern in the work of Phoebe Collings-James (b. 1987, London), a multidisciplinary artist who transforms the psychological weight of her lived experiences, particularly with regard to race, womanhood, and identity, into a physical and sonic archive. Her practice is an intimate confrontation with extreme emotions, ranging from profound grief and heartbreak to anger and erotic desire. For instance, her series Choke On Your Tongue (2014-15) was born out of intense feelings of being silenced and unable to express herself properly to the world, while her exhibition Just Enough Violence at Arcadia Missa in London (2016) highlighted the inescapable, politicised violence that lurks in our everyday lives and the “hostile environments”2 of systemic racism, colonialism, and sexism.

The “Infidel”: Archetype of Protest

To survive these environments, her art serves as a powerful tool for anti-assimilation and spiritual resistance. In her exhibition Bun Babylon: A Heretic’s Anthology, also at Arcadia Missa (2023), she created ceramic archetypes such as the “Infidel”: a protester, a heretic and an outsider ostracised from society because of their refusal to align. These figures are defined by rounded bodies which balance precariously on round steel bases, ensuring the Infidel can never be firmly pinned down by institutional structures. First introduced as one of six archetypes (alongside the Guardian, the Dreamer, the Silo, the Cypher, and the Preacher) this character rapidly gained independence and became the sole focus of her solo exhibition In Practice at SculptureCenter, New York (2024) and one of the central elements of the latest solo a rose, a bridge, a house (2026) at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London (2026). While the Infidel is an “outsider” who speaks into a crumbling, oppressive system (metaphorically referred to as “Babylon”), Collings-James insists that the Infidel is not just a political protester. Instead, it is a profoundly “spiritual figure; someone who has been displaced from a dogma”.3

In the exhibition at SculptureCenter, the sculptures were bell- or vessel-shaped, with parts that looked like necks, mouths, or pipes. That made them resemble bodies and instruments at once. Some pieces seemed stitched or bound, and others had sagged or twisted in the kiln. Those distortions come from deliberately firing the clay very hot, so it partially collapses. As a group, the sculptures are compared to instruments “playing themselves”,4 especially because a real, dented tuba bell is mixed in. So they feel like a noisy, chaotic orchestra even though they’re silent. When the works are placed in the neoclassical Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery of 19th-century architect Sir John Soane, they also contrast with the traditional cultural hierarchies established during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Here, the vessel-like or limbless bodies with wide-open mouths appear to scream, sing, and express acts of expulsion or resistance.

Haptic Materiality: Tactility and Memory

Her making process is intentionally physical and exhausting. In her 2014 Tar Baby and Ivory Black paintings, she paints using the soles of her feet in solitary, rhythmic performances until reaching physical depletion. In site-specific installations like red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth [kick dirt] (2024) at Kunstverein in Hamburg, she skids a bicycle back and forth across a clay-covered floor to engrave infinite loops into the earth. But what Collings-James especially masters is leveraging the tactility and alertness of clay, on which her hands can leave traces through pressing, rolling, and pulling. Crucially, she emphasises that clay is not a passive receptacle, but a reciprocal material with its own memory.5 According to the artist, clay “remembers” its prior configurations, shifting, warping, cracking, or sagging under its own weight during high-temperature firing. And the material also has its own agency, as it continues to “pop” and settle after coming out of the kiln, as if still breathing itself into being.

The Subtle Rules the Dense (2021) is a series of torso casings that resemble protective gear, specifically drawing inspiration from ancient Roman armour with door-knocker nipple rings, as well as pregnant body masks from Yoruba and Makonde ceremonial traditions. While armour is designed to protect, these scarred, pierced, and fragile ceramic bodies are used by Collings-James to explore the “clumsy signifiers of race, class, sexuality and gender”6 and how marginalised people are forced to awkwardly wear them. The series was first shown at her 2021 exhibition at Camden Art Centre, London, titled A Scratch! A Scratch! after a quote from Romeo and Juliet spoken by Mercutio as he is fatally wounded in a conflict he didn’t start. The quote represents the damage done to people caught in the crossfire of societal violence, unresolved conflict, and alienation, while also referring to the technique of sgraffito (scratching into the clay) that Collings-James uses to carve words, symbols, and marks through surface layers. In her 2025 exhibition at KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, one of the torsos was presented as a freestanding sculpture, transforming it from a flat, mask-like object into a figure with corporeal volume and a lifelike presence. The show also included her Clay Paintings (2025), where the clay surfaces were inscribed with engraved lines, signs, and image snippets. Displayed in a brightly lit space, these pieces functioned almost like entries from a private visual diary or fragments of dreams, showcasing her ongoing method of inscribing and layering meaning directly into the earth.

Most importantly, the scratching technique allows her to trace a lineage that bypasses Eurocentric epistemic hierarchies, as scratching is also foundational to ancient, non-Western practices, such as the cuneiform writing on clay tablets of Babylon and Sumer. Similarly, her scratches draw heavily on the symbolic language of West African Ashanti folklore, especially through the recurring motif of the spider, representing Anansi, the trickster and god of stories in Ashanti mythology. This allows her to bypass traditional institutional narratives, giving form to a new material memory that honours Caribbean and anti-colonial resistance, the fall of colonialism and capitalism.

In the most recent solo exhibition, Let this be the anchor at KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen (2026), this methodology dictates the entire concept of her "towers." Instead of representing rigid, monolithic architectural strength, her ceramic towers in Bremen are fragmented and physically vulnerable, demoting and subverting the idea of the tower as the ultimate symbol of Western monumental architecture, surveillance, and institutional power. She forces a traditionally rigid, masculine structure to behave like a vulnerable, shifting, and organic craft object.

Dismantling Hierarchies: Art, Craft, and Pedagogy

Another defining element of Collings-James’s practice is the refusal to separate fine art from craft, viewing this divide as a Western hierarchy built on colonial power relations. That specific concept is central to her 2025 exhibition at the KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and it serves as the ideological foundation for how she handles clay. Historically, Western institutions have categorised forms of making into a strict hierarchy: “fine arts” (like classical painting and marble sculpture, traditionally dominated by white, Western men) are placed at the top, while “crafts” (like pottery, weaving, and functional objects, historically associated with women, indigenous populations, and the working class) are pushed to the bottom. Collings-James rejects this separation entirely and argues that this divide is not a natural truth about art, but rather a deliberate cultural system designed to “divide and hierarchise knowledge, practices, and bodies”. By demoting ceramics to a mere “craft,” this system successfully binds “questions of origin, class, gender, and access to education together with colonial power relations”.7

These socio-political implications extend into the radical pedagogy of Mudbelly, her studio and teaching facility, offering free courses for Black people in London, taught by Black ceramicists. This initiative extends her philosophy of repair, ensuring that the politics of labour and the politics of clay are addressed simultaneously, establishing a radical extension of her artistic philosophy into the community. Her pedagogical framework is underpinned by extensive research into the British studio pottery movement and the labour history of Stoke-on-Trent and Bernard Leach’s historic workshop in St Ives, through which she examined how foundational British studio pottery traditions were established, institutionalised, and historically framed. She observes that while the dominant institutional history of UK pottery has been presented as white and Eurocentric, that framing obscures the global, colonial, and transcultural influences that underpin the medium. Furthermore, she points out that traditional UK studio environments and pottery curricula routinely lack political awareness around access and fail to teach or acknowledge Black ceramic traditions and non-Western material histories.8

Collings-James’s philosophy aligns with a broader movement of Black female artists who use clay to step out of the shadow of Western patriarchy. As highlighted in the 2022 exhibition Body Vessel Clay at Two Temple Place, London, which featured Collings-James alongside generations of Black female ceramicists, the medium of clay honours matrilineal teaching and ancestral memory. In this context, craft is not a lesser discipline, but a universal language capable of communicating complex identities and histories far beyond the confines of the traditional fine art world.

Sound and Dub

Collings-James explicitly compares her method of collecting and drawing symbols onto clay surfaces to the process of audio sampling: building a library of sounds/images to edit and reconfigure.9 Sound is indeed one of her media, and besides working under the musical alias “young nettle” and as a member of B.O.S.S. (Black Obsidian Sound System), Collings-James often utilises sound integrated into her sculptures. At Camden Art Centre in 2021, she used water-filled ceramic vessels as sounding wells receiving a tapestry of London street noise, tarot circle poetry, and film audio. For the exhibition KINDL in 2025, she created a new audio piece titled Elysium Fields Avenue (2025), which wove together field recordings from London and New Orleans into a delicate acoustic composition. In installations like the tandem Expensive Shit and Primordial Soup (2017), speakers rigged to wooden structures play recorded conversations between her grandmother, speaking in a London Cockney accent, and her great-aunt, speaking in a Jamaican accent, using sound to explore diaspora, memory, and oral storytelling. In the video work Mother Tongue, Mother Master (2018), she wears small brass bells attached to netting over her face, creating a physical, rhythmic tension between her head movements and the ringing audio.

She draws conceptual inspiration from reggae, Rastafarian music and Jamaican dub. Dub is the musical process of copying, fragmenting, and manipulating existing vocal or instrumental pieces to create new, hybrid tracks filled with echoes and repetitions, and in her work assumes a narrative function of “rupture and repair” within the context of the African Caribbean diaspora. The fragmentation and manipulation of the audio tracks mirror the historical trauma and cultural rupture experienced by people of African Caribbean and mixed descent who were separated from their places of origin. The music creates an immersive space for collective resistance, spiritual transformation, and community building, representing “something that leaves and returns” to bring displaced people “home”.10

Instead of using standard electronic speakers, Collings-James uses her handmade ceramic bells and water vessels to physically amplify and distort the sound, taking inspiration from pioneering multidisciplinary African American artist and musician Terry Adkins, known for integrating physical musical instruments and sonic elements directly into his sculptural installations.

Stuart Hall and the Transcultural Subject

Within Collings-James’s practice, Adkins exists alongside a broader lineage of Black artists, poets, thinkers, and musicians such as Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Beverly Buchanan, and Barrington Levy, whose work challenges Eurocentric art traditions and informs her exploration of memory, resistance, and material transformation. She draws on Césaire’s examination of historical trauma, colonialism, identity, and belonging, and uses Wynter’s writings as a conceptual framework through which to decipher her complex relationship to Western ceramic traditions, as well as to examine her own Jamaican ancestral roots and British identity. But most of all, the conceptual grounding of Collings-James’s work heavily relies on sociologist Stuart Hall’s assertion that culture and identity are not fixed ontologies (”being”), but ongoing processes of transformation (”becoming”).11 Hall posits that subjects produce themselves anew by taking a “detour” through various pasts, reinterpreting cultural traditions rather than remaining bound by them.

In line with this thinking, Collings-James does not treat ancestral traditions as static artefacts to be passively inherited or preserved. Instead, she detours through disparate historical and geographical markers and fuses ancestral practices with references to modern pop culture and dub music. She flattens cultural hierarchies in several ways: she intentionally merges Western classical forms (like Roman armour) with inspiration from West African Makonde and Yoruba body masks; she builds her Infidels sculptures using traditional Caribbean coiling techniques; she uses sgraffito to directly link 16th-century Italian architectural decoration with traditional African ceramics and ancient Babylonian and Sumerian cuneiform. The resulting sculptures become hybrid, transcultural subjects that reflect an identity continuously in flux.