Ceramics is a medium that has long occupied an ambiguous place within the art world. Historically relegated to the realm of craft or design, it often lingered at the periphery of contemporary art discourse, overshadowed by painting, sculpture, and installation. Yet over the past decade, ceramics has undergone a remarkable shift, moving decisively from the margins to the center of attention. Dedicated ceramic art fairs such as Ceramic Brussels testify to this rise, while leading museums, galleries, and collections increasingly foreground clay as a material of critical and conceptual relevance. This article highlights thirty artists who exemplify this transformation. Selected through a combination of editorial curation and supported by the objective ranking system of ArtFacts, these artists demonstrate the breadth and vitality of ceramics today.
27. Jessica Stoller
Jessica Stoller (b. 1981, Detroit, Michigan, the United States) is a sculptor whose intricate porcelain works mine the material’s long-standing associations with taste, desire, and power. Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, she harnesses the history of porcelain to expand a feminist visual language, creating spaces of subversion, defiance, and play. Her sculptures juxtapose fragility with the grotesque, drawing on art historical traditions ranging from Rococo excess to decorative floral porcelain, while incorporating imagery of the body, food, and ornament. Female figures in her work embrace what is often suppressed—flaunting pleasure, abjection, and unruly vitality. Her labor-intensive process combines sculpting, draping, piping, and carving, often with multiple layers of china paint that transform the porcelain’s surfaces into sites of texture and excess. In her hands, the ‘grotesque’ becomes a powerful aesthetic and political tool, collapsing distinctions between beauty and decay, desire and repulsion, consumption and excess. By reframing the decorative arts as a space for critical engagement, her practice reclaims porcelain as a medium for feminist storytelling. Stoller lives and works in West New York, the United States.