When Irish fine artist Camilla Hanney discovered ceramics and in particular, porcelain, she found her true love. “It has a sense of daintiness or fragileness to it, and I love that quality of porcelain,” she explains from London where she is based. “It’s very kind of genteel, and I like subverting that. I like to try and make works that use those delicate qualities and grab those associations, but then try and flip them.” This might mean her series of Virgin Marys, standard bearers of purity at first glance, turned on their heads through the addition of sly snakes and ram horns. Another piece, Feast (2020), takes the form of a towering three-tiered porcelain cake, overflowing with decadence, laced pearls, and connotations of desire. It looks like a classic wedding cake at first, until you notice the frowning face on the upper-most tier—even with all this, she is still unsatisfied. The works engage with themes of sexuality, consumption, and the cultural construction of womanhood, twisting the sanctified with the occult, while exploring the female body as the site of constriction and rebellion. Several of Hanney’s pieces sit quite beautifully, and subversively, within the home, like the shapely porcelain pots (ideal for holding candles or small plants) originally commissioned by the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation, where Hanney had a residency.
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