Clementine Keith-Roach Unearths Ancient Vessels for Her Motherly Sculptures — Colossal

From her studio in Dorset, Clementine Keith-Roach sculpts expressive, bodily forms that appear as if plucked from an ancient cavern or soot-filled cellar.

The terracotta works feature fragments of weathered limbs that crisscross and grasp fingers around hand-built vessels. Dents, cracks, and white patina mark the surfaces of each domestic object and trace their histories and former uses.

In a conversation with Colossal, Keith-Roach frequently references themes of nurturing and communal responsibility and the roles she sees those values playing in a world that strives more earnestly for equality and care. What if we saw mothering as a metaphor, she asks?

The transformative nature of pregnancy, the ways bodies merge, and a mandate of care figure prominently in the artist’s practice. When she became a mother herself, she felt “broken apart,” both psychologically and physically as she responded to the needs of the baby.

This severing between mind and body remains in Keith-Roach’s work, as nude, headless chests buttress a wide, sloping bowl in “Eternal return,” for example. Although she currently enjoys leaving the vessels empty, milk would fill the basins in some of her earlier pieces, directly invoking motherhood.

Keith-Roach refers to her new works—which are on view at PPOW in New York—as “statues,” although she complicates the idea that monuments deify singular people, often men with imperial inclinations. Instead, her sculptures remain anonymous and contain several pairs of hands or limbs that, often literally, elevate a central object.

“A statue boils down to a representation of an individual. Even if they’re the most extraordinary person, they’re born out of a social moment,” the artist adds. “An individual is never isolated. They’re born out of a kind of collective moment.”

At the center of each work is an antique terracotta amphora the artist sources from second-hand shops and markets. Plaster casts of her own body and those of her friends create a series of detached limbs that, despite retaining the distinctive wrinkles and shapes of a particular person, are unidentifiable as they cradle or reach across the vessel.

For some sculptures, Keith-Roach wanted to have the bodies merge before they were pulled from the cast. When creating “Herm,” for example, she asked her subjects to stand tightly together, allowing their skin to touch so she could create one form from two figures. In many works, she says, “a multitude of people becomes one mass.”

Once she fuses the body parts to the anchoring amphora, Keith-Roach embarks on a deceptive trompe l’oeil process, in which she paints and conditions the new additions to mimic the patinaed surfaces of the older components. In the completed sculptures, there’s tension between the body’s inevitable decay and the timeless durability of ceramic, which the artist celebrates:

My works have this sacred quality to them. There’s raising the domestic vessel up, transforming it into something ceremonial. It’s taking it out of the everyday and making it into an object of reflection. It’s the same with the body parts. It’s looking at these movements and gestures and things we do every day and monumentalizing them. It’s monumentalizing the everyday.

Keith-Roach’s solo exhibition New Statue is on view through December 21. You can find more of her work on Instagram.