Tom Humphreys

Rob Tufnell presents new ceramic sculptural works by Tom Humphreys.

Although influenced by the ceramic work of Paul Gauguin, who looked to provincial France and the Pacific, Humphreys looks instead for genuinely crude inspiration: such as the contents of his studio bin, children’s plasticine modelling and primordial scatology.

Works utilise both traditional ceramic materials alongside more unusual ingredients such as shellac (the rich coloured resin made from the secretions of lac insects). More irreverent additions include what he describes as ‘foreign bodies’: ersatz aquarium stones, computer cables and blue silicon repairs. Before being conventionally fired at high temperatures, some pieces are frozen whilst drying in order to open up fissures in their surface. Such apparent irreverence towards the craft is however born less from iconoclasm and more from a wish to explore the limits of the media. The results are variously wall-mounted and free-standing, representational and abstract or, more often than not, somewhere between the two.

The exhibition takes its title from a work created from a bag of clay that was pierced and prodded and dented by footprints. The sculpture bears an impression left by the sole of a shoe inscribed with the word ‘Genesis’.

Humphreys (b. 1972 in Essex) lives and works in London. He studied at Winchester School of Art and Design and Chelsea College of Art. He previously exhibited with the gallery in Cologne in 2017 and in London in 2014. Other recent solo exhibitions of his work include those with Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, 2019; Schiefe Zähne, Berlin and North Dumpling, New York, 2018 and High Art, Paris, 2017. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2015). Humphreys initiated and ran the gallery Flaca in London from 2003 - 2007. A revised history of this important space, ‘Flaca/ Tom Humphreys’ was presented at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main in 2011