FOG DESIGN + ART: Michaela Yearwood-Dan | Ceramics

For inquiries, please contact Director Savannah Downs: 

savannah@boeskygallery.com

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new ceramic works by London-based artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b. 1994; London, UK) for FOG DESIGN + ART 2024. With this newest body of work in clay, Yearwood-Dan pushes her evocative, handmade vessels into a larger scale, placing her firmly within a rich legacy of contemporary ceramic craftsmanship. 

Throughout her practice, Yearwood-Dan endeavors to build spaces of queer community, abundance, and joy. While the artist is perhaps best known for her lush, abstract paintings, she works with equal fluency in clay, often incorporating elements of her singular visual language—swirling, gestural brushstrokes, botanical motifs, and handwritten, diaristic meditations—into her ceramic works. The artist’s presentation for FOG is her first to focus solely on sculptural work.  

Yearwood-Dan began working with clay in 2020, teaching herself to hand build pots in her London flat during Covid-19 lockdown. She began producing vessels, vases, and planters that are defined, in part, by their insistent handmadeness. Irregularities in the surfaces and handles and lips of these functional objects serve as evidence of their materiality—and of the artist’s hands at work. The glaze is marked by its relationship to Yearwood-Dan’s painting practice: Pieces of language—pulled from song lyrics, from poetry, from the artist’s own writings—intertwine with brushy areas of color and suggestions of plant and aquatic forms, hugging the bellies of these vessels or hidden within their open lips. These musings—appearing at various scales and degrees of legibility—are at once insightful and funny, confident and questioning, beckoning the viewer to look closer, to peer inside, to move around, to be present in their physicality and objecthood. 

Yearwood-Dan's newest ceramics are both personal and political. In the forms of the vessels, the artist makes reference to the female form, their unapologetic femininity directly linked to her painting practice. The artist draws inspiration from the rich pottery traditions—both historic and contemporary—of the Caribbean, Japan, West Africa, and First Nations, engaging with methods of making that are often relegated to the status of craft and the realm of the feminine, in direct contradiction to her monumentally-scaled painting practice. Wholeheartedly embracing the functional connotations associated with her ceramic forms, she appropriates notions of femininity and infuses her work with an inviting domesticity. Nevertheless, these cultural associations and narratives come together to form work that is uncompromising of the self, examining love, queerness, and blackness by way of which Yearwood-Dan writes her own histories. Ultimately, with her ceramic work, Yearwood-Dan summons viewers into a vivid, welcoming world of paradox, play, and contemplation, of hand-crafted forms, poetic musings, and saturated colors.

Yearwood-Dan will also be in conversation with artist Emma Fineman at 4 PM on Saturday, January 20 at St. Joseph’s Arts Society, 1401 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA.