Ceramics have myriad applications as decor. They maybe used around the dining table as tea and coffee sets, plates, jugs, and cups, or arranged elsewhere in the home as flower vases, ashtrays, or simply objects intended to be looked at and appreciated. Shapes, sizes, and colors matter, and the dialectic between form and function is constantly at work.

The Accolay potters based their decorative designs on the zeitgeist of their era, selecting inspirations, colors, and shapes from the cultural influences circulating around them. Temporary collaborators who stopped over in the village for months or even just a few days were free to propose new ideas, with potential products assessed in terms of ease and speed of manufacturing, as well as the likelihood of commercial success.

As such, it would be difficult to classify the potters’ decorative approaches according to set typologies. Among the collection of 124 works exhibited at UCCA Clay, there are a signifcant number of vases and tobacco pots. The tobacco pots take the form of human bodies, their lids forming detailed heads with eyes, noses, and mouths. Many glossy glazed vases are decorated with human or animal figures, while the “chamotte” pieces (incorporating ground, pre-fired clay as a material) are mainly abstract, with green, brown, and white lines and biomorphic patterns. The surfaces of these works range from smooth to glossy to grainy, yet they all possess a handmade touch, granted by each potter on the wheel.

Like several other potters from the same era—such as Jacques Sagan in Vallauris, for instance—the artists in Accolay worked extensively with the form of them ask.

How did the magical world evoked by these masks reach the pragmatic world of Accolay’s potters? They were doubtlessly informed by Picasso and Braque’s engagement with “primitive” art under the banner of cubism in the early 20th century, as well as the popularity of “ethnic” artifacts as home decor in Europe during the 1950s. Accolay masks consist of convex oval shapes, pierced by at least three round holes for eyes and a mouth, with monochromic glazing, and the occasional line of color dividing the face. The overall effect recalls traditional art from Oceania, or even hieratic Cycladic figures.

Clearly, these works are closer to tributes to the generic idea of “tribal masks,” rather than detailed studies of precisely sourced artifacts. The strengths—and limitations—of these masks lie precisely in their ambiguity and approximate position somewhere between pure creative expression and loose cultural appropriation.

The Accolay potters created an amazing bestiary of animal figurines—tiny pieces combining little glazed ceramic balls with NiCrAl wire, an alloy of nickel, chromium, and aluminum. In the 1950s, Comanducci Sesto Ceramiche, a company from Tuscany, Italy, was well-known for producing similar figurines made of ceramic components connected with thin metal wire, which were used to decorate ashtrays and small cups. Their designs sometimes referenced Disney characters.

In contrast, Accolay’s animals are self-supporting and speak for themselves. These dogs, cats, wild pigs, birds, rabbits, and giraffes are elegant, thin objects probably intended for displaying lass vitrines in modernist apartments. A series of slightly larger colorful glazed butterflies were likely meant to be displayed on walls, alongside them asks.

The idea for these works came from Raphaël Giarrusso (1925-1986) and Georges Pelletier (1938-2024). Pelletier stayed in Accolay for a relatively brief period of time and decades later set up his own ceramic studio in Cannes, where he developed a visual vocabulary of radiating suns and golden glazed lamps. In these figurines, artists in Accolay brought together their own fantastical thinking with inspiration from Alexander Calder’s wire animals, which he primarily created during the 1920s and 1930s.

Sylvie Auvray (b. 1974, Paris, France) works across multiple media, including, but not limited to, painting, jewelry, and ceramics. Her work in clay foregrounds handmade organic forms, often pairing them with vibrant colors and complex textures created through experimentation with the firing process. The resulting works exude a sense of innocent joy, occasionally tempered by a woozy strangeness. Though currently based in Paris, Auvray has deepened her practice through residences at the renowned ceramics Arts program of California state university, Long Beach, and in Shigaraki, Japan, a historical pottery-making center. Juxtaposed with the work of Accolay potters on the museum’s first floor, her ceramic sculptures and masks illustrate the ways in which the group’s creative approach continues to resonate with artists working today. Jar (2022) resembles a doll-like figure expanded to the size of a human being, yet is also a container, echoing how artists in Accolay positioned ceramics somewhere between functional objects and a medium for pure artistic expression. Head (2020-2022), a set of masks, reprises a form also showcased in the Accolay ceramics on display here. Occasionally skeletal, sometimes humorously abstracted, they recall ancient burial masks from around the world, suggesting both commonalities between cultures and the mutability of the different identities we perform.

Roberto Cuoghi (b. 1973, Modena, Italy) cannot be categorized as a painter, sculptor, sound artist, installation artist, or ceramist—he is all of the above and even more. Cuoghi is an explorer who is always following his own agenda; he is an experimenter whose curiosity has no limit, which allows him to go deep into the unknown, or, conversely, to loop back and generate a sense o f déjà vu. The works on display here are part of the series “Putiferio” (2016-2019), which emerged out of a 2016 exhibition of the same name, organized by the DESTE Foundation on the Greek island of Hydra. Inspired by mason wasp nests he observed around the exhibition site, the artist built his own kilns, then staged a live performance in which he fired ceramic sculptures based on crabs he purchased at a local market. Crabs and other crustaceans are often grayish blue but turn red when cooked; Cuoghi uncannily reverses this process. These works display an affinity with handicrafts, yet also gesture towards something darker and weirder, evoking monsters and grotesque ancient artifacts.

Based in Burgundy, the region in which Accolay is located, Nitsa Meletopoulos (b. 1984, Carpentras, France) creates work that is rooted in art history and French ceramic-making traditions, yet also innately contemporary. Trained in both psychoanalysis and art, she is equally likely to take inspiration from Rococo ornamentation and current pop culture, and utilizes traditional ceramic techniques such as throwing and molding alongside emerging technologies like three-dimensional printing. In her own words, “I mix art and craft and question shapes, history, techniques, and uses through my work.” Even when working on contemporary art-oriented projects, Meletopoulos maintains a focus on utilitarian objects such as dish ware, vases, and pots. Colors superimposed on curvilinear shapes give her self-standing pieces a real sculptural mood. Handles often stick out of the bodies of her ceramics, creating a feeling of fragility and establishing distance between artwork and viewer. In this exhibition, two bulbous, multi-colored cups that share the title of Dinette cosmique [Cosmic Toy Tea set](both 2023) encapsulate the artist’s approach: rooted in the everyday, yet playful and possessing a touch of the otherworldly.

Rena Kudoh (b. 1994, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan) is known for creating ceramic creatures inspired by memories and dreams. However, her work is not only shaped by her own thoughts and perceptions: in the artist’s words, she attempts “to mix my experience with someone else’s, to embrace the chaos that meets the other in me. ” An empathetic acknowledgment of otherness is palpable in her uncanny depictions of dogs, horses, spiders, and other unidentifiable creatures. Fired as porcelain, the artist’s anthropomorphic, puppet-like sculptures transmute forms a child might create playing with food into oversized pastel-toned ceramics, unbalanced yet somehow solid and brimming with vitality. Fittingly, Kudoh has described her first experiences working with clay as akin to “making a golem.” Currently based in Mexico for a one-year residency project, the artist has spoken of similarities between the literary genre of magical realism, “which doesn’t distinguish between reality and magic” and her own practice. Placed in conversation with collectively-credited Accolay ceramics, Kudoh’s works offer a distinctly contemporary perspective on the relationship between the self and others. Furthermore, her transient, residency-based practice echoes the lifestyle of the many artists who passed through Accolay.

Takuro Kuwata (b. 1981, Hiroshima, Japan) takes Japanese ceramic tradition and pushes it to riotous extremes. Updating ancient aesthetics into rebellious, violently fractured forms, his practice maybe best described by the title of a recent solo exhibition:“Tea Bowl Punk.” Kuwata’s work exhibits the Japanese philosophical concept of wabi-sabi—the embrace of imperfection—yet he takes this approach farther than most. For example, he repurposes traditional techniques like ishi-haze (embedding small pebbles in clay before firing to create varied textures) and kintsugi (repairing cracked ceramics with gold lacquer), distorting the shape of his works by using large stones, and covering more than half of some pieces in gold. Tea bowls, a key element of Japanese tea culture, are usually crafted in earthy colors, yet Kuwata opts for a bright palette inspired by pop art and hip hop culture, applying luminous glaze in thick, dripping layers. Many of his works take the tea bowl as their basic structure, but are closed on top, transforming them into abstract sculptures. Like the work of the Accolay potters, these works challenge the distinction between functional handicrafts and fine art.

Working with plaster, a ubiquitous, unremarkable material, Ou Ming (b. 1983, Hubei province, China) puts aside his years of traditional academic training in sculpture and instead crafts pure, three-dimensional forms that appear to organically grow out of their bases. Over the course of his practice, he has observed that plaster gradually hardens as the moisture within it evaporates, meaning that he only has a limited amount of time to sculpt the material. Furthermore, plaster’s absorbent qualities cause its color to change immediately upon contact with liquids, then revert to its original appearance after moisture evaporates. Here, the time inherent to the sculpting process and evaporation are captured as dynamic visual elements, granting Ou Ming’s work a tangible sense of temporality. The artist also incorporates clay—which shares many traits with plaster—into his artworks, immersing unusually shaped pieces of plaster in water held in ceramic vessels. As a result, the plaster objects’ colors constantly shift according to the degree to which moisture has been absorbed and evaporated. In some of his works, plaster becomes a connecting component, like the bellows of an accordion, dialectically located in between different, harder sections of the object. This exhibition features three large sculptural assemblages from the “Love city” series, whose eye-catching, unconventional colors and vessel-based forms resonate with the bold palette s and rich vocabulary of shapes used in Accolay ceramics.

It was Sun Yue’s (b. 1991, Liaoning province, China) background in fashion design that initially caused her to consider the dialectical relationship between material and the body. From there, her experimentation with different materials and media would eventually lead her to the realm of ceramics. Sun Yue integrates fashion’s three-dimensional draping techniques into her ceramic practice: echoing how considerations of the space between wearer’s body and fabric shape the structure of garments, in ceramics forms and boundaries are gradually defined through the physical interaction between the potter’s hands and the clay. Early exploration into functional vessels allowed Sun Yue to gain experience making ceramics; as her technical skills gradually developed, she was able to infuse her work with a greater sense of self-expression. As a result, her practice has evolved into a deeply personal investigation into unknown psychological spaces and a non-systematic means of processing imagination and memory. She elects to use the ancient pottery technique of coiling, allowing the sense of touch to guide her as she gradually shapes clay into symbolic forms. The artist’s wood-fired works are dotted with serendipitous burnt spots and crystals of glaze, recording currents of air within the kiln and the past growth of the trees that fuel it. Utilizing stoneware—a material in between earthenware and porcelain—Sun Yue constructs a labyrinth of clay, representing the “gray areas” of her memory through spatial transformation.

Traditional Chinese philosophy holds that “heaven,” “earth,” and “humanity” are the three fundamental elements of the universe. In order for the environment as a whole to be in harmony, they must be soundly connected and in balance. As a pandemic swept across the globe a few years ago, Geng Xue (b. 1983, Jilin, China) perceived a rupture in the relationship between these three elements, leaving the fate of humanity in an unfathomable, unpredictable state. At the same time, observing her newborn child, she rediscovered how human beings seem to have an acute sensitivity towards the natural world, or even spiritual energy—as if new life holds an innate capacity to connect with “earth” and “heaven.” In ancient sacrificial rites, jade vessels known as cong were seen as a means of communication between humans and deities; today, Geng Xue seeks to use this medium to re-establish a shared spirituality linking “heaven,” “earth,” and “humanity.” She makes cong-like shapes through coiling, then embeds small forms embodying both natural life and the accomplishments of human intellect—for example, biological cells, human organs, and aircraft—on their surfaces. The spiraling upward momentum captured in her works conveys the feeling of a vital force bursting beyond constraints. Through her series “Ritual Human Artifact,” Geng Xue seeks to generate new resonances between primeval past and future, individual existence and cosmic energy. Additionally, the series’ evocation of ancient culture initiates a dialogue with the naive, “primitive” styles of the Accolay potters.