London-based Ghanaian ceramic artist, Mawuena Kattah, has been named among the ten artists selected to produce new work for the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) Award. The award, which is lauded as the UK’s leading platform for contemporary ceramic art practice, provides a snapshot and celebration of current activity in ceramic art.

For its 2021 award scheduled to be part of the BCB festival holding in Stoke-on-Trent this September, the award got over 160 entries. From this vast collection, Mawuena Kattah was selected alongside Alison Cooke, Christie Brown, Cleo Mussi, Connor Coulston, Helen Beard, Ho Lai, Jin Eui Kim, Stephen Dixon, and Tamsin van Essen, to vie for the £5,000 prize for excellence, innovation, and creative ambition.

According to the award’s official website, the shortlist “features some of the UK’s most innovative contemporary ceramic artists and reflects a range of approaches – from vessels to mosaics, sculpture to installation art.” 

The Meal, Mawuena’s proposal for the Award, is a “ceramic table setting for eight people inspired by her regular trips to Brixton market to buy the food and African fabrics that inspire her work”. For this exhibition, Mawuena has collaborated with chef and author Zoe Adjonyoh to create a bespoke menu for The Meal. A consummate artist whose practice draws heavily from the extensive personal archive of family photographs taken in Ghana over the past two decades and more recent studio photographs of the family taken in London, she uses immersive installations that place textiles, painting, and ceramics together to create semi-domestic spaces and invites her audiences to share in her multi-layered experience of collectivity and kinship.

Mawuena’s paintings, prints, ceramics, and textiles have been exhibited in major contemporary art galleries and museums in the UK, including the acquisition of works by the Arts Council’s National Collection and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Furthermore, her work has been exhibited in major group outings in the UK including ‘Criminal Ornamentation’ Curated by Yinka Shonibare MBE, ‘Walls Have Ears: 400 Years of Change’, Aston Hall (2018), Whitechapel Gallery (2009), and Studio Voltaire (2012) and a solo exhibition at Tenderbooks (2016).

The new work to be produced by the other selected artists for the Award is rich in diversity and imagination, “using ceramics to make sense of our changing world by exploring geopolitical, environmental and social-political themes”. 

Alison Cooke will create an installation made from clay taken from below the North Sea following her collaboration with the scientific research team Europe’s Lost Frontiers; Christie Brown will explore the connection between life drawings and 3D ceramics, creating a tableau of clay figures against a frieze backdrop of life drawing; Cleo Mussi will produce a series of life-size 2D figures to create a timeline exploring the interaction of human life with the natural world, which will explore how the British landscape has changed and evolved with the movement of people, be it thanks to Brexit, covid, health, economics or climate change. 

For Connor Coulston who explores socio-political themes such as depression, masculinity, equality and loneliness, his work will be a Christmas angel ornament belonging to his nan reimagined as a depressed single mother of four; Ho Lai’s proposed work, Fluxing Red, is a series of fifty red-stained bone china wall objects capturing the map outline of Hong Kong, which is intended as a response to the government’s decision to allow British National Overseas passport holders from Hong Kong to become British citizens and the resulting identity crisis felt by many contemporary migrants; Stephen Dixon’s Ship of Dreams and Nightmares will be a four-meter silhouette of an overloaded and dilapidated Mediterranean refugee ship created from multiple hand-built and tin-glazed ceramic objects suspended with a scaffolding structure, intended to highlight the ongoing tragedy of migration; Tamsin van Essen will create a series of abstracted Ayurvedic surgical tools using porcelain and fine red earthenware, with the resulting ambiguous, eroded forms exploring notions of function and value.

According to the chair of the judging panel, Alun Graves, Senior Curator in the Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass Department at the V&A, he remarked that:

‘In these extraordinary times, the desire to engage and communicate through the intensely physical material of clay has never been stronger. The shortlist for AWARD 2021 reflects the dynamism of contemporary ceramics, embracing artists of the highest international standing as well as others who have more recently broken through onto the scene.’

The 2021 Award is the seventh edition of the Biennial Festival and is scheduled to run from 11 September to 17 October 2021 with a rich judging panel that includes Skinder Hundal, Director of Arts, British Council.

Aworanka wishes Mawuena all the best. As we root for her to have a successful outing, we say may the best ceramic artist win!