Clementine Keith-Roach digs up old ships for her motherly sculptures – colossal

From her studio in Dorset, Clementine Keith-Roach sculpts expressive, bodily forms that look as if they were plucked from an ancient cave or soot-filled cellar.

The terracotta works feature fragments of weathered limbs that criss-cross and interlock fingers around hand-built vessels. Dents, cracks and white patina mark the surfaces of each household object, tracing their history and past use.

Speaking to Colossal, Keith-Roach frequently references themes of nurturing and communal responsibility and the role she sees these values ​​playing in a world that is more seriously pursuing equality and care. What if we saw motherhood as a metaphor, she asks?

The transformative nature of pregnancy, the way bodies merge, and a mandate of care are prominent in the artist’s practice. When she became a mother herself, she felt “broken apart,” both psychologically and physically, as she responded to the baby’s needs.

This separation between body and mind remains present in Keith-Roach’s work, such as naked, headless coffins that support a wide, sloping bowl in ‘Eternal Return’, for example. Although she currently enjoys emptying the vessels, milk would fill the basins in some of her earlier pieces, directly invoking motherhood.

Keith-Roach refers to her new works, which can be seen at P.P.O.W in New York – as ‘statues’, although she complicates the idea that monuments deify special people, often men with imperial tendencies. Instead, her sculptures remain anonymous and feature multiple pairs of hands or limbs that, often literally, elevate a central object.

“A statue comes down to a representation of an individual. Even though they are the most special people, they were born from a social moment,” the artist adds. “An individual is never isolated. They were born from a kind of collective moment.”

At the center of each work is an antique terracotta amphora that the artist sources from second-hand shops and markets. Plaster casts of her own body and those of her friends create a series of loose limbs that, despite retaining the distinctive wrinkles and shapes of a particular person, are unidentifiable because they cradle or reach across the vessel.

For some sculptures, Keith-Roach wanted to fuse the bodies together before pulling them from the cast. For example, when creating ‘Herm’ she asked her subjects to stand close to each other so that their skin could touch, so that she could create one shape from two figures. In many works, she says, “a multitude of people become one mass.”

Once she has fused the body parts to the anchoring amphora, Keith-Roach begins a deceptive trompe l’oeil process, painting and conditioning the new additions to mimic the patinated surfaces of the older components. In the finished sculptures there is a tension between the inevitable decay of the body and the timeless durability of ceramics, which the artist celebrates:

My works have this sacred quality. You lift the domestic ship and transform it into something ceremonial. It takes it out of the everyday and turns it into an object of reflection. The same goes for the body parts. It’s looking at these movements, gestures and things that we do every day and monumentalizing them. It monumentalizes the everyday.

Solo exhibition by Keith-Roach New statue can be seen until December 21. You can find more of her work at Instagram.