For Ranti Bam, Clay is Life

Ranti Bam b. 1982, Nigeria Follow +

Bam refers to these stools in Yoruba, akpoti, which represent traditions of rest and gathering that feed into the artist’s description of her sculptures as hearths. The idea of the vessel as a place of communal nourishment connected to the site that hosted Bam’s sculptures, where Liverpool’s first recorded Black resident, a former slave named Abell, was buried. There, Bam’s earthen bodies doubled as guardians and votive offerings, assembled to honour one life as a prism into so many others.

For Bam, clay is both an archive and a connective tissue: a living material that relates to all living beings as bodies fashioned from the earth. Hence the title of this ongoing series, ‘Ifas’, referring to the Yoruba words ifá, meaning ‘divination’, and I-fàá, ‘to pull close’. Each clay form channels a deeper connection to self and place, reaching beyond language into the ineffable realms of energetic, material being.

Bam’s debut exhibition in New York with James Cohan, Anima (17 May–26 July 2024), expands on these ideas. On view are several new ‘Ifa’ sculptures, this time with bases built into their forms as stoneware legs, presented alongside new compositions from the artist’s ‘abstract vessels’ series (2024).

The show’s title, Anima, refers to concepts of the soul and feminine unconscious, which psychoanalyst Carl Jung described as ‘an imprint or “archetype” of all the ancestral experiences of the female’.¹ But as Bam notes, her work is not about gender since Yoruba is a genderless language. Rather, it is about the qualities that are traditionally understood as feminine—including the life-giving and life-sustaining forces of care, vulnerability, and resilience.

“Each clay form channels a deeper connection to self and place, reaching beyond language into the ineffable realms of energetic, material being.

All this boils down to what Bam summarises as ‘softness’—a condition that defines her abstract vessels. Each sculpture is composed of thinly rolled clay slabs that are painted on or mono-printed with pigmented slips before their assembly into delicate, oblong vessels that rest on legs or curved bottoms.

Combining gestural strokes, swirls, and printed shapes, from vines to florets, these three-dimensional patchworks are painterly compositions that invoke the minimalist grid. They refer to Hieronymus Bosch’s 16th-century painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, with colours ranging from pastel greens to rosy pinks and midnight blues, and compositions that turn Bosch’s interlocking bodies into an overlapping of skins.

The exterior of each vase is left unglazed, accentuating the delicate cracked surfaces that speak to the artist’s collaboration with her material, where she tests clay’s capabilities by rolling sheets as thinly as possible and firing vessels as one piece and at high heat. By contrast, the inside of each form is glazed, as if to reflect on the idea of the anima as a luminous, reflective interiority.

In some instances, shapes are cut into the clay, as with Mimo (2024), where a grid of circular voids on a canary yellow sheet hints at the glazed green coating the surface within. In other instances, strips are arranged to create gaps in the form; in the case of Riiroo (2024), two ribbons slump so delicately at the lip that they appear like gauze.

Such details activate an awareness of the material: a revelation that reflects Bam’s experience of working with clay and asking the material to show her what it can do. That invitation to actively see possibility in matter is rooted to Bam’s relationship with clay as a portal into an expanded, relational consciousness.

An interest in how we move through the world and interact with others infuses Bam’s practice, whether through clay-making workshops organised with Franco-African women in France, feminist activists in Kenya, or architects in the U.K., or in performances like Sowing Seeds in Hearthland. Performed at Art X Lagos 2022, Bam and a group of women built clay vessels filled with soil and seeds in homage to the Baobab tree, a traditional site of gathering across the African continent.

Sowing Seeds in Hearthland connects with the two-channel video In Hearthlands (2022), presented as part of Common Ground, a remarkable exhibition of ‘Ifa’ sculptures at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in 2022. In the video, Bam embraces a vessel whose coiled composition and contoured, dimpled surface echo the ancient tree trunks surrounding the artist in the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria, a UNESCO World Heritage site revered as the home of Yoruba fertility goddess Osun.

Both performances beautifully express what Bam celebrates with every clay form. Life is an act of creation and creation is an act of life: earth is the ground upon which that profound miracle unfolds. —[O]

Main image: Exhibition view: Ranti Bam, Anima, James Cohan, New York (17 May–26 July 2024). Courtesy James Cohan. Photo: Phoebed Heurle.