31 OCTOBER - 12 DECEMBER, 2026
“This work so artfully combines stillness and a sense of risk, of fragility.
Sometimes it is a single object – then there are those seemingly arbitrary couplings or slightly perverse groupings that quietly and insistently demand a shift in our perception.
Indeed they all were once, in the making process, exceedingly fragile; needing, before and during both bisque and high temperature reduction firing, to be propped up or supported upside down and fired on porcelain trays or setters: carefully, patiently, slowly, surely, crafted. But now, strong, dense, confident, beautiful – to be used, to be held.
I hope you see these pots when the sun is out. They quicken with light, The pale objects are softly luminous and translucent, while the dark aubergines and blacks glow satiny rich, their rims reflecting.”
— Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, 2005
Exhibition text
Prue Venables builds on the long history of the vessel in ceramics, a form shaped by both porcelain production and studio pottery. The artist's early work sits within this tradition, engaging the vessel through its established forms and its association with use. Central to the practice is the porcelain itself, worked so finely that light enters the walls of each form, an effect that asks for a degree of time and skill few pursue.
Over time, Venables' attention shifts from the individual vessel to the relationships between forms. Single vessels remain part of the practice, but it is in pairs and, more recently, large groupings that the work now takes its clearest form. Balance becomes the organising principle, with each form weighted against another, and the shapes extend well beyond the traditional vessel, which is understood less as a container than as a presence within a composition.
This attention to the space between forms is at the centre of the solo exhibition Ma (間). The character combines the sign for a gate with the sun, suggesting light passing through an opening, and the concept is long held in Japanese art, architecture and music. Ma describes the silence between raindrops or musical notes, an active presence that defines the objects and moments around it. This idea resonates with Venables' engagement with classical music, where the pause between notes gives the music its shape. Venables' forms play with the shadows and spaces within and between.
Photographs can describe the form, but not how light settles into porcelain this fine, or how each work shifts as you move around it. That quiet difference is found in the room, and it is there that Venables' work reveals itself.
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