Osaan

Ranti Bam was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and moved to North London as a child. She trained at the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London and splits her time between London and Lagos. The ceramic vessels she makes merge her training in painting and in clay. In the artist’s words, to create her works, she “collag[es] embellished slabs into form.” The embellishments she employs are drawn from Nigerian textiles, traditional Yoruba spiritualism, and what she calls “Anglo-Saxon formal gestures and traditions.” She treats clay like fabric, cutting it and assembling it or stitching it together as one would a textile. Bam decorates the exterior of her pieces through monoprinting and painting their surface with slips and stains, typically leaving them unglazed. The vessels have extremely thin walls and are fired at temperatures very high for terracotta. By “pushing the material to its limits,” the artist writes, she engages with concepts of fragility and vulnerability.