Sabbe from the Folly Series

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.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Nicola Tassie describes herself as a potter but her work incorporates thrown tableware, wall based projections, and large scale sculpture installations. Rather than sitting in opposition to each other these disparate strands coexist in a continuous loop of exchange, evolution and inquiry.  Ideas of utility exist as both concept and practice. Her Lighting series consists of lamps as sculptures, and as functioning designs. Surface effects and processes transition seamlessly from a sturdy jug onto a wall-mounted abstract ‘clay canvas’. Domestic ware forms are amalgamated into composite sculptures that are either stacked into tall multi-glazed towers or sit horizontally, echoing landscaped pathways or ‘stone walls’, literally and figuratively elevating everyday objects into totemic form. At the core her practice is a reimagining of the ordinary into the extraordinary. By synthesizing historical references, domestic objects and experimental processes, she asks what it means to work with the ancient medium of ceramics in the 21st century.

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