Pythia from the Folly Series
(Sculpture in Foreground in image).
Although the artist often refers to her stacked ceramic sculptures with the nickname ‘totems’, the series is actually called ‘The Follies’. It references a text written by the 16 th century writer Erasmus – In Praise of Folly (Translation by John Wilson). ‘Folly praises herself endlessly arguing that life would be dull and distasteful without her”.
Nicola see the ‘Follies’ as an accumulation of thrown pots, stacked up high into a non-designed tower of glazed vessels that aspire to reach beyond their usual domestic purpose. The domestic pot occupies the realm of the quiet or unheard, they accumulate in the back of kitchen cupboards, piled up for storage in ever diminishing space. But as stacked structures they move from their functional purpose of containing and enclosing space to inhabiting and intervening in it.
Nicola Tassie’s work occupies a compelling intersection between the functional and the conceptual. Drawing on centuries-old pottery traditions, she transforms familiar domestic forms into sculptural compositions that question the boundaries between vessel and sculpture, use and meaning. Her Totem series, which has developed and expanded over time, began with the stacking of domestic vessels into fragile vertical towers, referencing both interior domestic scenes and exterior landscapes, such as stone walls or cairns, structures assembled through repetition and touch. These Totems have become more abstract over time and continue to challenge the expected domestic domain of studio ceramics and suggest ideas of containment and aspiration.
Through Tassie’s work, we are invited to consider how the spaces and structures we build, both social and architectural, mirror the systems, hierarchies, and values of their time. Just as architecture records the priorities and tensions of a culture, her stacked forms evoke the precarious balance of the domestic and the societal, the individual and the collective. The Totems become metaphors for how we construct meaning, identity, and belonging through material and form. In this way, her work resonates deeply with Constructed in Clay’s central inquiry: how acts of making reflect the structures, both physical and ideological, that shape contemporary life.
Dimensions: 28.3"h
Material: Stoneware
Artwork ships in:
Pythia from the Folly Series
Artist Statement
About the Artist
NICOLA TASSIE