Isis Dove-Edwin

I made a late entry to a career as an artist. I started out in a different profession, then spent time at home with my four young children. Along the way, I developed a passion for clay, particularly the ceramic language of materiality, process, and form. I am fascinated by its documentary power – everyday life, events and ideas can be captured in clay objects. 

There are two main strands to my work: a primary practice which documents and explores historical and contemporary social themes that primarily relate to the Black African diaspora, and a creative collaborative practice as 2nd Shift with Leonora Lockhart, researching and responding to the impact of being an artist-mother.

In 2021 I gained a first-class BA (Hons) in Ceramic Design at Central Saint Martins, and am a member of the Pollen Collective of artists.  A previous project was recently shown at NYCxDesign 2023, and some of my current work at London Craft Week 2023 Open Studios. 

I have been awarded the RJ Washington Bursary Award 2023.

This work explores the diaspora of objects.  My starting point is the 'traditional' domestic coiled terracotta pot, burnished, low fired and communally made by women in West Africa. Pots travelled to colonial museums where they were decontextualised and classified as ethnographic objects to highlight otherness, and they remain in these settings, where they suggest a fixed tradition and creative stasis.   

The work sits alongside wider socio-political narratives and decolonial discourse which I have brought together through making. Drawing on craft and historical narratives, my intention has been to disrupt and activate form and surface, as a means of storytelling and embodied practice. I worked expressively, gesturally, and at increasing scale, to create objects that evoke labour and landscapes, and the body in form and expression. Colours insinuate fire, sun, vegetation, night, tropicality, joy, humour, and pain, always with the blue of the ocean, so fundamental to diasporic histories. 

The work can speak to post-colonial hybridity, Paul Gilroy's double consciousness of the Black Atlantic, or simply exist in its own space - objects on the edge of pot and figure, craft and art, glaze and paint, monument and decoration.