Phoebe Collings-James
Nature Boy
Phoebe Collings-James is a multidisciplinary artist who, over the past two decades, has developed a practice that spans music, sound, painting, and writing, with an increasing focus on ceramic sculpture. In this first solo exhibition in Portugal, Collings-James presents existing works alongside a group of new works conceived and produced in Portugal and in London specifically for this occasion.
About the Exhibition
Phoebe Collings-James’ practice engages with the contradictions and frictions of everyday life, bringing together ceramic sculpture and painting as sites of confrontation, reciprocity, and transformation. Marks, signs, and iron-rich surfaces operate as traces of resistance, while performance-based processes inform the genesis of the works, embedding the body directly into their making.
Drawing from a wide constellation of references — spanning Roman armour, African and Caribbean ceramic traditions, and literary and musical influences — the works resist fixed readings. Recurring sculptural forms, often suggestive of armour, masks, or living bodies, navigate between protection and vulnerability, abstraction and figuration.
Since 2019, this expanded practice has extended into Mudbelly Ceramics, a travelling research and teaching initiative offering free ceramics courses for Black people in London. Operating through collective exchange rather than monetary systems, Mudbelly foregrounds alternative models of knowledge transmission, care, and continuity.
Selection of Works by the Artist
