Carla Wright
Carla Wright is an artist living and working in East Sussex, UK. She makes ceramic sculpture, wall-based works & participatory projects that explore connection, co-operation and togetherness - through an investigation into social housing, community architecture & places of gathering.
Motifs & fragments of playgrounds & community centre murals appear throughout the work. Her practice is informed by growing up around this type of architecture and responding through immediate ceramic ‘drawings’ and larger sculptural assemblages - interconnecting & grouping of objects, navigating their way around each other with a sense of playfulness, risk & care.
Carla uses clay as a connecting material - connecting her to people, to her past & to the ground, giving her a deeper knowledge of the community and of the land. The individual works evolve through ongoing research of materials; locally found clay, granite, quartz, ironstone and plants are incorporated into the glazes & clay body.
Carla is the founder of Common Clay - a community ceramics studio that is a shared, open and experimental making space for artists working with clay, and provides clay sessions for local groups.
Carla Wright
b.1984 UK
BA (Fine Art), Bath School of Art and Design, Bath, 2007
MA (Fine Art), Chelsea College of Art & Design, London 2010
Founder of Common Clay - www.commonclay.co.uk
Part of Vulpes Vulpes - www.vulpesvulpes.org
Studio pottery - www.charleston.org.uk/
Selected exhibitions/projects
2023
FRESH Award at The British Ceramics Biennial, Stoke on Trent
Folde, Observer Building, Hastings
Radiant Objects, Electro Studios, Hastings
Spaces, Places, Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City
2022
Granite Flows Towards You (solo), Coldens Gallery, St. Leonards
Babes in Arms, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Innocent Pleasures Suit Me, Warbling Collective, London
Qvevri, Collected Fictions, St. Leonards
2021
Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer 5th Edition, Buckinghamshire
It Glows Light, Maze Collective, Delhi, India
2020
BrewersTowner International, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
Gathering Container, Flatland Projects, Hastings
2019
Common Ware, PEER Gallery, Hoxton, London
2018
Lot, part of Park(ing) Day, De La Warr Pavilion
Saudade, with EAC, Twelve Twelve Gallery, The Netherlands
2015
Pool - A Bermondsey Artists' Group Exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries, London
Make Use (solo) - A public project commissioned by AIR Central Saint Martins, London
2014
The Artist and the City - AirSpace Gallery/The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent
Parlour - Residency and exhibition at AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent
No Meaning, 5MONTHS project space, London
2013
Housing a Pig, Flood, Dublin, Ireland
Mais je ne sais quel œil par accidents nouveaux - Cargo Culte II, Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale, Paris
Awards:
2020 - A-N Artist Bursary
2015/2019 - Arts Council Grants for the Arts
2009 - Patrick Caulfield Scholarship
Residencies:
2017 - Residency at The Edge Arts, Bath University
2016 - Time and Space Residency at Metal Southend
2014 - Parlour, group residency at AirSpace Gallery
2013 - AIR Mini-residencies led by Ruth Ewan, Rachel Anderson of Artangel and Anna Hart, UK
2010 - Residency at HICA (The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art), Scotland