Ani Lacy • Wild Clay, Terracotta, and Black Atlantic Ceramic Practice

My studio practice sits at the intersection of material culture, embodied traditions, migration, and personal history. As a ceramic artist working in Bath, England, I explore how clay holds memory, loss, and inheritance, especially within Black Atlantic and diasporic contexts. I work with clay bodies as active collaborators, allowing the material to reveal its own histories, fragilities, and transformations.

My early work focused on porcelain and bone china, while my recent practice engages primarily with terracotta and wild clay. These materials allow me to explore ecological memory, foraged processes, and site-responsive making. I am particularly drawn to the liminality and transience of unfired or low-fired clay, whose shifting states speak to migration, the fluidity of identity, and the constant reshaping of self and community.

This approach aligns with my broader interest in diasporic material culture and practice-based research. Through hand-building, burnishing, pit-firing, casting, and mixed-media installation, I consider how clay reflects ongoing processes of cultural continuity and adaptation. My studio work is deeply connected to questions of emplacement and ethno-genesis, in which spatialised identities are continually formed, disrupted, and reimagined.

Clay, for me, is both medium and method: a way of thinking, remembering, and grounding stories that move across landscapes and generations.