The body holds memory, and so does porcelain. Fired ceramic holds permanent marks from the pressure of a maker’s hand, incised and embossed marks and the wearing of a surface. In Embodied, Chinese artist Liu Xi presents three bodies of work in which the female body, and a woman’s subjectivity, appear not as an image but as an impression left behind.

Our God is Great challenges the viewer to confront what is more usually hidden, depicting the infinite variety and beauty of female genitalia, enlarging the vulva until we cannot look away. Lace pressed into the wet clay embosses the labial surfaces, fired to 1300°C and then gilded with the same electroplating that finishes costume jewellery, so the gold oscillates between the sacred and the secular. Multiplied across the wall, the works read at once as a declaration of female power and as a memorial to the daughters lost during the years of China’s One Child Policy, and those (like the artist herself) who were unwelcome arrivals due to the traditional preference for sons.

MaMa, in contrast, explores memory, mourning and the sacrifices of mothers. Wooden washboards, obsolete since electricity, cast in stark white porcelain are stood upright like memorial stele, bearing no epitaph, only the ridges on which women scrubbed their laundry. The first washboard the artist cast in this series belonged to her mother, found forgotten in a corner on a visit home. In Stigma, words used to ‘keep women  in their place’ are incised in Chinese and English into slip-cast blades, sickles and hooks, glazed a fleshy pink and suspended overhead. The old playground taunt of ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ is, as we all know, very far from the truth. Stigma reveals the scars left by misogyny.

Across all three bodies of work, Liu subverts the refinement of porcelain, and its associations with imperial China, challenging the histories it was made to serve.

Curated by Dr Luise Guest