London Dispatch / May 2026 / Part II

Exhibition view, ‘Sam Bakewell: Anything Is A Mirror’
COURTESY: Sam Bakewell & Corvi-Mora

Part I of our London May Dispatch focused on central London, this second part takes us across the capital. The variety of thoughtful work in different materials is striking. And so is the presence of ceramics in leading commercial art galleries and public museums.

Exhibition view, ‘South of the River’, with (left to right) Nicola Tassie, ‘The Ellipse Diptych’, 2021; Nicola Tassie, ‘Pipework Diptych’, 2020;
COURTESY: Nicola Tassie & 8 Holland Street

‘Phoebe Collings-James: a rose, a bridge, a house’
Pitzhanger Manor and Art Gallery
Until 14^th June 2026
First, to Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing. This was the country home of the neo-classical architect Sir John Soane, designed to showcase his imaginative flair. Now a public museum and art gallery, artworks are displayed throughout the carefully restored eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portions of the house – complete with Soane’s idiosyncratic detailing – as well as in a later purpose-built gallery.

Exhibition view, ‘Phoebe Collings-James: a rose, a bridge, a house’
COURTESY: Phoebe Collings-James & Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

Exhibition view, ‘Phoebe Collings-James: a rose, a bridge, a house’
COURTESY: Phoebe Collings-James & Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

Currently, there are two exhibitions: a powerful display of ceramic sculptures and vessels by Phoebe Collings-James; and a beguiling display of fabrics, wallpapers and artwork by the still-active nonagenarian designer Marthe Armitage.

Exhibition view, ‘Marthe Armitage: Pattern Maker’
COURTESY: Marthe Armitage & Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

London-born Jamaican-British Collings-James comes from another world from Soane, but both are knowing heirs to multiple cultural lineages. Soane’s immersion in the legacies of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome coincided historically with rampant colonisation and the peak of the Atlantic slave trade. Soane was known for his pro-emancipation sympathies, but his innovative designs entrench a specific cultural hierarchy. Collings-James, meanwhile, draws on Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, Ashanti folklore and traditional Caribbean coiling techniques – among other creative traditions – to give voice to the pain and joy of those excluded or silenced by those hierarchies. 

Phoebe Collings-James, ‘Infidel [devils chariot]’, 2025
COURTESY: © Phoebe Collings-James & Arcadia Missa / PHOTOGRAPH: Andy Stagg

Collings-James has a practice that includes music, sound, painting and writing as well as community-based projects such as the Turner-Prize nominated Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) and her ceramics studio, Mudbelly. Since a 2014 residency in Italy, clay has become her primary medium. She speaks in an accompanying film of how clay demands patience, requires humility, exposes vulnerability and embodies fragility, all leading to greater depth of thought and communication. 

Exhibition view, ‘Phoebe Collings-James: a rose, a bridge, a house’
COURTESY: Phoebe Collings-James & Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

In Collings-James’s hands, the material is subtle, responsive, alive. Some works are wall pieces or small sculptures, for instance, a ‘Black black rose’ to answer to Soane’s own stylised flower decorations in the white painted panelling. Many are pots, from the ongoing series, ‘Infidels’, vessels with mouths and limbless bodies that yearn and groan, shout, recoil and stand resolute.  

Phoebe Collings-James, ‘Infidel [blue blurrr]’, 2025
COURTESY: © Phoebe Collings-James & Arcadia Missa / PHOTOGRAPH: Andy Stagg

In the heart of Soane’s home, the Breakfast Room, stands a chest piece from Colling-James’s ‘Armour’ series (‘The subtle rules the dense’, 2023), inspired equally by the conflicting eroticism and protective function of Roman armoured breast-plates, and Yoruba and Makonde body masks that portray pregnant forms. Moulded on a mannequin and then handworked, with thick glaze sliding from the exposed androgynous terracotta body, the work speaks with shining emotional clarity through multiple binaries, drawing ancient and modern into a continuous line of human experience.

Phoebe Collings-James, ‘The subtle rules the dense’, 2023
COURTESY: © Phoebe Collings-James & Arcadia Missa / PHOTOGRAPH: Andy Stagg

‘Forest + Found: The House Is Full Of Ghosts’
‘Frances Pinnock: Repose’
8 Holland Street | South of the River
Until 13^th June
In a hiatus between headquarters, design emporium 8 Holland Street has filled two atmospheric townhouses on Kennington Lane SE11, with six diverse exhibitions and artist residencies spanning sculpture, textile, ceramic, print, furniture and design. All the artists have been invited to explore the psychology of the home, and the intimate relationships between domestic objects and their owners. Two of the exhibitions showcase makers crossing the divide between craft based disciplines and fine art.

Exhibition view, ‘South of the River’, with (left to right) Forest + Found | Max Bainbridge, ‘Offering Bowl’, 2026; Forest + Found | Abigail Booth, ‘The Witness’, 2023; Forest + Found | Abigail Booth, ‘In This Thin Skin’, 2024
COURTESY: Forest + Found & 8 Holland Street

For Max Bainbridge and Abigail Booth, of studio collective Forest + Found, connoisseurs of absence and loss, the focus is on the building, its own memory and disquieting sense of abandonment. Bainbridge works with turned and hollowed wood, and Booth with a multi-disciplinary language of textiles, painting, sculpture and print. Together, their works here allude to domestic labour – the stitching and the woodwork, the alienated tree trunks, the discarded clay pipes, the soot, the physical work that holds homes together – as well as to specific familial memories embedded in humble objects.

Exhibition view, ‘South of the River’, with Forest + Found | Max Bainbridge, ‘Corpus’, 2026
COURTESY: Forest + Found & 8 Holland Street

Each room offers a contrast between Bainbridge’s striking sculptural installations (including a hollowed out ash torso, and a hand-hewn table laden with white and black turned wood bowl) and Booth’s subtle architectural interventions and wall-pieces. These invite you to dwell with their many-layered and worked surfaces, gatherings of elusive narratives. The spareness of the display reinforces the contrast between the embodied permanence of the architecture and transience of its fleeting mortal inhabitants.

To complement Forest + Found’s exploration of materials, 8 Holland Street is hosting the delicate and thoughtful exhibition ‘Repose’, by Frances Pinnock. Here she uses vellum (very high quality, translucent parchment) and goatskin parchment alongside other materials to create a series of potent, poetic objects, light of touch – their meaning hovering just out of focus. Each seems to commemorate a precise action: the twisting of a piece of brass; the cutting and pinning down of a slip of parchment on a beautifully mottled goatskin parchment base, which traps a ring of hemp and copper leaf and a small section of white horsehair; the wrapping of a section of antique beading.

Frances Pinnock, ‘A Treat for the Tall’, 2024
COURTESY: Frances Pinnock & 8 Holland Street

‘Slip Alone’ suggests textiles hung on a rail, frozen into stillness as if in a painting. Once you register that the material is goatskin parchment, effectively skin, here hung on brass, as if preserved in a reliquary, the sinister beauty of the sculptural pelts becomes clear. Parchment and vellum are mediators between flesh and spirit. A wrapped section of antique pine skirting, salvaged, honoured, adorned with brass and horsehair, looks like a book: as if the history of the house from which it came has been distilled and captured by the vellum. And yet while traditionally vellum, as a writing material, was an aid to clarity and revelation, here it as much occludes as reveals, protects as much as it exposes.

Frances Pinnock, ‘Slip Alone’, 2025
COURTESY: Frances Pinnock & 8 Holland Street / PHOTOGRAPH: Daniz Guzel

Alongside, Nicola Tassie, in a display titled ‘The Hearth’, has put together a group of ceramic works celebrating the functional pot, and its role in sustaining the rituals and bonds of social life, as well as some more sculptural pieces. She has a wonderful talent for capturing the essence of different styles – from Bernard Leach to Julian Stair. As a final flourish, the location showcases an edit of 8 Holland Street’s collection of twentieth-century furniture and design, including pieces by Mario Ceroli, Ettore Sottsass, Vico Magistretti and Charlotte Perriand. 

Exhibition view, ‘South of the River’ with (left to right): Olivier Mourgue, ‘Djinn Chaise Lounge’, circa 1960s; Angelo Testa, ‘Wall Tapestry’, circa 1945; Parigi and Prina, ‘Orix Desk, Red’, for Molteni; Vico Magistretti, ‘Gaudi Chair’, 1970
COURTESY: the artists & 8 Holland Street

Sam Bakewell: Anything Is A Mirror
Corvi-Mora
Closes 30^th May
The title of this show is both magnificently true and laughably wide of the mark. It is, of course, only a practised artist who can turn 57 book-sized thick slabs of wedged clay, blank, boring, like large pats of butter before the cat gets to them, into a mirror for our deepest memories and most elusive feelings. Here Bakewell – who completed his MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, in 2011, subsequently winning the 2015 BCB Award at the British Ceramic Biennial in Stoke on Trent and being awarded the Jerwood Makers in 2017, while taking on an artist in residency at the V&A in 2019 – revels in that mastery and his medium.

Sam Bakewell, ‘Anything is A Mirror IV’, 2026
COURTESY: Sam Bakewell & Corvi-Mora

For once the artist begins to work: to knead, to scrape, to score, to poke, to draw a brush across the surface, to splatter, to dollop, to drip, to imprint, to slice and wrap and fold, to tear bits off and pass them between thumb and finger like orecchiette or clouds – and that is even before we have begun to talk about the glazes! – this inanimate material stirs to life.

Exhibition view, ‘Sam Bakewell: Anything Is A Mirror’
COURTESY: Sam Bakewell & Corvi-Mora

Even the smallest intervention, a drag of a finger, seems to have a kind of magic. It is the alchemy of intention – supported by the marriage of imagination with technique. Because once Bakewell has made his individual slabs, he must then decide on one of myriad glazes and glaze techniques, which transforms them again. The whole project represents both the highest form of play and the most sophisticated abstraction.

Sam Bakewell, ‘Anything is A Mirror XXII’, 2026
COURTESY: Sam Bakewell & Corvi-Mora

The brilliance of this show, however, lies ultimately then in the decision to hang them in pairs. Bakewell, in his note about the show, calls them “odd couples”. He adds “I hoped each would be the most ‘extra’ version of itself it could. Be it gaudy, seductive, tacky, gross, lusty,etc, giving it its moment, but still sitting in some relation to its partner to make a whole. It’s romantic.”

And of course it stirs the romantic in the viewer. One pairing surely represents the whole of art history from Chinese landscape to Western portraiture? Another gestures to Arte Povera and Rothko. But another is surely about cooking? From soft fats to baked goods. Some appeal more to the eye and mind, some more to the tongue or the hand. They are only mirrors to each other in that by contrast, they magnify the other’s qualities. But they are certainly mirrors to the viewer who sees deeply into the history of art making – while also seeing reflected back their own life experiences.

Sam Bakewell, ‘Anything is A Mirror XX’, 2026
COURTESY: Sam Bakewell & Corvi-Mora