This major new commission was a culmination of research developed over the past two years through their residency, and coincides with a solo exhibition of their work over the last ten years at Modern Art Oxford (5 March-1 May 2022). Darling’s work addresses the fallibility, adaptability and vulnerability of living beings, society and technologies. They have used their fellowship to explore the histories of extraction and exhumation, and to consider clay as a material formed from the architectural, ancestral, cultural, and corporeal bodies of our material world. This entanglement and the possibilities it offers for radically re-thinking our binaries of body and methodologies of living has enabled Darling to reflect on the condition of being human. It is an idea they continue to return to in their work as they consider our failures and inevitable decay and ask: what is allowed to live, what is allowed to die and what outlives us.

The Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship supports emerging artists working with clay. Between 2017-22, the Fellowship offered artists part-time six-month residencies at Camden Art Centre with an exhibition in the following year.

Photo: Eva Herzog