Refigured
12 May – 21 June 2026
Across sculpture, statuary, devotional forms, and porcelain figurines, this exhibition presents a collective reassessment of the human presence in clay. Drawing on mythic, classical, and domestic traditions, the works return to forms we think we know and reshape them for the present.
For millennia, clay has been pressed into the likeness of the body to symbolise protection, power, beauty, motherhood, authority, and belief. Figurative ceramics have functioned as talismans, ornaments, souvenirs, political statements, and markers of identity. Here, tradition is neither preserved nor rejected, but carefully re-examined. Archetypes fracture, ornament becomes subversive, idealisation yields to vulnerability. The familiar ceramic body, once emblem or decoration, re-emerges as a place of tension and renewal.
The works draw on ancient and cross-cultural archetypes, reconfiguring inherited hierarchies through subtle shifts in posture, gesture, and symbolism. Porcelain forms that reference the devotional and mythic reveal tenderness and exposure beneath immaculate surfaces. Other sculptures interrogate classical and monumental languages, destabilising inherited ideas of authority through fragmentation, distortion, and quiet introspection. Elsewhere, figurines are disrupted, their decorative calm punctured by visceral interventions that expose precarity beneath refinement.
Together, the works explore fragility, gender, authority, humour, and collective memory through the enduring language of figurative ceramics. The body, rendered in earthenware, porcelain, and stoneware, becomes a bearer of contradiction: shaped by history yet open to revision.
Refigured transforms inherited ceramic forms into resonant contemporary presences. The body is no longer passive ornament or unquestioned emblem, but an intimate, embodied form, both iconic and breakable, through which we reconsider how humanity has been shaped, idealised, and imagined in clay.
Exhibiting artists: Fernanda Cortes, Claire Curneen, Jessica Harrison, John Rainey
Artists
John Rainey
John Rainey is a sculptor based between Belfast and Dublin. He completed an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art (London, 2012) and has been awarded residencies at KonstfackUniversity for Arts, Crafts and Design (Stockholm, 2013), the British School at Rome (Rome, 2018), Eton College Drawing Schools (Windsor, 2024/25) and the Digital Stone Project (Gramolazzo, 2023, 2026). Solo exhibitions include: ‘Errors’ at Berg Gallery (Stockholm, 2025), ‘Decoys and Ghosts’ at Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast, 2025), and ‘SLIP TANK’ at the Naughton Gallery (Belfast, 2021). His sculptures are held in public collections including the UK Government Art Collection, the Irish State Collection (OPW), the Irish National Collection (Crawford Art Gallery), the Ulster Museum, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection, and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Jessica Harrison
jessicaharrison.studio
Jessica Harrison (b. 1982 in St Bees, UK) lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
She graduated from Edinburgh University with a practice-based PhD in Sculpture in 2013 and became an academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2015.
She has exhibited extensively across Europe, North America and Asia and her work is included in the collections of the Ariana Museum (Geneva) the Princesshof Ceramic Museum (Leeuwarden), the University of Edinburgh Art Collection (Edinburgh), Pallant House Gallery (Chicester), the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh) and the New Art Gallery Walsall (Walsall), among others.
Claire Curneen
clairecurneen.com
Claire Curneen creates figurative sculptures that poignantly reflect on humanity. Universal themes of loss, suffering, sacrifice and rebirth underpin her works. Hand-built in white porcelain, sometimes with touches of blue or gold, their translucent and fragile qualities offer metaphors through which we can consider the human condition and experience. Born in Ireland, Curneen studied at Cork, Belfast and Cardiff, where she now lives and works.
Fernanda Cortes
fernandacortes.com
Fernanda Cortes is a sculptor working primarily with clay, shaping hand‑built stoneware figures that sit somewhere between the familiar and the uncanny. Short stories accompany the work, extending the forms into a parallel narrative world.
Her practice has been supported by several awards, including the RCA Innovation Scholarship, the City of Vénissieux Award at the XV Bienal Internacional de Cerámica de Manises, and Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant.
Fernanda trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), later completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in London. She also studied at ENSCI in Paris and the Université de Moncton in Canada, experiences that shaped her material and research‑led approach.
Recent exhibitions include Cabinet de Curiosités Contemporain Brussels Art Square at JKugel Gallery (Brussels), Liminal Salon III at Liminal Gallery (Margate) and Micromania 2026 at Kalman Gallery (Maastricht). Forthcoming exhibition includes the Museo Regional de Cholula (Mexico).
Fernanda has taken part in residencies across Europe, including Guldagergaard (Denmark), La Meridiana (Italy), Yorkshire Artspace, Huddersfield University, Dovecot Studios (Scotland), and forthcoming, the Bruckner Foundation (Switzerland).
