Artists: John Rainey - Fernanda Cortes - Claire Curneen - Jessica Harrison

Across sculpture, statuary, devotional forms, and porcelain figurines, this exhibition presents a collective reassessment of the human presence in clay. Drawing on mythic, classical, and domestic traditions, the works return to forms we think we know and reshape them for the present.

For millennia, clay has been pressed into the likeness of the body to symbolise protection, power, beauty, motherhood, authority, and belief. Figurative ceramics have functioned as talismans, ornaments, souvenirs, political statements, and markers of identity. Here, tradition is neither preserved nor rejected, but carefully re-examined. Archetypes fracture, ornament becomes subversive, idealisation yields to vulnerability. The familiar ceramic body, once emblem or decoration, re-emerges as a place of tension and renewal.

The works draw on ancient and cross-cultural archetypes, reconfiguring inherited hierarchies through subtle shifts in posture, gesture, and symbolism. Porcelain forms that reference the devotional and mythic reveal tenderness and exposure beneath immaculate surfaces. Other sculptures interrogate classical and monumental languages, destabilising inherited ideas of authority through fragmentation, distortion, and quiet introspection. Elsewhere, figurines are disrupted, their decorative calm punctured by visceral interventions that expose precarity beneath refinement.

Together, the works explore fragility, gender, authority, humour, and collective memory through the enduring language of figurative ceramics. The body, rendered in earthenware, porcelain, and stoneware, becomes a bearer of contradiction: shaped by history yet open to revision.

Re-Figured transforms inherited ceramic forms into resonant contemporary presences. The body is no longer passive ornament or unquestioned emblem, but an intimate, embodied form, both iconic and breakable, through which we reconsider how humanity has been shaped, idealised, and imagined in clay.