The present work, with arresting technical and physical presence, recalls traumas of the past; the majestic, fragile and ethereal form is instilled with pathos. Synthesising the visual intersections amongst cultures, historical precedents, and geographical boundaries, Simone Leigh’s contemporary ceramic practice astutely challenges and scrutinises notions of the femininity, race, politics and society.

Testament to the gravitas of her work, Leigh, who won the Studio Museum, Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in October 2017, has been selected as the inaugural winner of the New York High Line’s new large scale commissions. Her sixteen-foot sculpture Brick House will be exhibited on the High Line in Manhattan from April 2019. This commission, a monumental bronze sculpture, portrays an African-American woman whose braids are reminiscent of flying buttresses and whose torso is conflated with the outlines of a skirt and a mud house.

Raised in Chicago by Jamaican parents, Leigh studied feminist and post-colonial theory as a philosophy student. Encountering ceramics and its orientalist origins, Leigh formally investigated this interest during her residency at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where she focused on West African ceramics from an ethnographic standpoint. Employing a rich matrix of cultural signifiers from African, African-American and Caribbean history, Leigh’s ceramic practice integrates video, sculpture and installation, and is underlined by her continuous investigation into black female partiality and ethnography.

Synthesising an array of influences, Leigh’s practice is centred around totemic objects weighted with cultural memory. From arresting ceramic heads of black women, large architectural houses or domes to ceramic forms in the shape of cowrie shells, such as the present work, Leigh’s practice directly engages the viewer into her socio-political dialogue. The artist’s poignant engagement with cowrie shells references the long-standing African practice of using the shells as a form of currency, often called the ‘money cowrie’; historically they were amongst the items that Europeans exchanged with coastal West African groups for slaves. With 65 of the artist’s spherical shells forming the core of her 2012 landmark exhibition, You Don’t know Where Her Mouth Has Been at The Kitchen, New York, in 2012, the present work is an elegant, yet loaded icon weighted with social and historical significance.

Commenting on her interpretation of cultural symbols, the artist notes how they have ‘been used to humiliate us for years and years…when they are actually really quite beautiful and sophisticated objects…I’ve often used that kind of charged image in my work, objects like watermelons or cowrie shells’ (Simone Leigh, quoted in Robin Pogrebin and Hilarie M. Sheets, ‘An Artist Ascendant: Simone Leigh Moves Into the Mainstream’, The New York Times, 29 August 2018, online).

Employing ancient African pottery techniques to create works that are profoundly contemporary, the present work is a refined example of Leigh’s technical dexterity. Reflecting on her ceramic practice, the artist notes ‘Most of the cowries I made are porcelain and are fired in a salt kiln - an atmospheric firing with common salt thrown into the kiln at peak temperature…The salt bonds with the silica in the clay body to form a glaze whose texture is reminiscent of orange peel, which provides lots of unpredictable effects’ (Simone Leigh, quoted in Elizabeth Kley, ‘MOUTHING OFF’, artnet, online).

Engaging with traditional materials, techniques and forms relating to African art and culture, the artist forges creative spaces which conflate historical precedent and her own autonomy as an artist, creating ‘something both so contemporary and ancestral’ (Julián Zugazagoitia, quoted in Robin Pogrebin and Hilarie M. Sheets, ‘An Artist Ascendant: Simone Leigh Moves Into the Mainstream’, The New York Times, 29 August 2018, online).