In Practice: Infidels

Phoebe Collings-James’ works across media function as debris of

knowledge, feeling, violence, language, and desire that result from

living and surviving within hostile environments. At SculptureCenter,

Collings-James exhibits Infidels, a new series of ceramic sculptures

that explore relationships between heresy, faith, and orthodoxies

of religion, state, and society. Intensely colored by iron-rich glazes,

using various firing techniques, each of Collings-James’ sculptures

elaborates on the position of the heretic as a transmitter of incendiary

speech, opposition from within, and ostracisation.

Here, Collings-James’s work performs sound without sound,

and voice without voice, transferring sensory experiences across

media and giving material shape to resonance and speech. Collings-

James refigures ideas of visuality, frequency, and attunement to “the

tempo and tenor of blackness” (see Tina Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists

Changing How We See) out of film and moving image into the physical

world and the slower speeds of sculpture.

Each of Collings-James’s ceramic sculptures comprises a

bell- or vessel-like form with protruding parts that look like craning

necks, mouths, or pipes growing from their heads. Some show stitches,

sutures, or binding lines up their spines, and some appear to have

sagged or twisted under their own weight during firing, setting their

apertures at off angles. These moments of collapse result from firing

at high temperatures, a production decision that retains the energy

of an ecstatic outburst and release in each work, in parallel with the

somatic experience of the infidel Collings-James explores across the

series. Together these works appear cacophonous, as instruments

playing themselves, heightened by the artist’s inclusion of a brass tuba

bell pocked with dents within their midst. At the same time, they are

slightly anthropomorphic, to be read as figures singing or lamenting,

and even zoomorphic, with swan-like necks tuning the viewer’s

speculation toward the half-trumpet, half-squawk of waterfowl calls.

With these conflicting and simultaneous cues as to what a viewer

might hear with their eyes, as it were, Collings-James establishes a

“sonic bearing” (in the artist’s words) of outsider speech: language or

almost-language, noises that verge on words.

In contrast to such formal and sonic ambiguity, Collings-

James’ works are also imprinted with fragments of text, acting as rare

bits of literal expression, suggestions, or language clues. These are

sometimes hidden under layers of glaze and other times fully exposed:

belly/beast, a kind of metaphysical yet fleshy geolocation; Escuchad!,

invoking the survival and persistence through a bilingual tongue of

New York City; and Land Back, an urgent refrain.

Embossing (as Collings-James does with bespoke roulettes),

stamping, and inscription have long had important and varied

functions in the history of craft, sometimes adding or removing layers

of abstraction from utilitarian objects, and sometimes identifying

or misdirecting authorship. Considered within the Infidels’ broader

exploration of outsider-versus-insider status, and inflected by

decolonial and queer political positions, these techniques continue

a relationship to varied historical and contemporary African and

African diasporic techniques for the surface decoration of coil-built

vessels. In dialogue with recent iterations on these traditions, one

inscription on Collings-James’ work reads Out of Anarchy, a reference

to the sculptor Donald Locke (1930–2010), who worked between

Guyana, Britain, and the United States.

In subtle reference to Doyle Lane (1923–2002), an artist

associated (in retrospect) with an underexplored sensibility for queer

Black art in postwar Los Angeles, Collings-James’ exhibition also

includes a few ceramic beads that call to Lane’s small-scale weed pots

and his own beads, which occupied his production for much of the final

years of his life. Collings-James’ beads appear almost as hidden as a

tongue, a shim, or a minor organ in just a few works—continuing an

exploration of expression and its suppression that implicates many

speakers in conversation through time.