A voice leaked out through a crack in my throat

Collaborative at County Hall Pottery

County Hall Pottery is pleased to present Collaborative, a cross-disciplinary exhibition for London Design Festival 2025 that explores the creative potential of connection through clay.
Rooted in the tactile and transformative nature of ceramics, Collaborative brings together five leading ceramic artists, each paired with a creative practitioner from a different discipline. Spanning music, woodworking, architecture, and culinary arts, these partnerships reimagine ceramics as a shared language of innovation, functionality, and artistic dialogue.

For this exhibition, Carla Wright and Isobel Anderson present a new collaborative work that brings together ceramics and sound. The piece extends Carla’s exploration of how women connect through language—particularly gossip as a form of knowledge, care, and solidarity—alongside Isobel’s experience as a vocalist and her practice of using sound as an aesthetic and sculptural medium. Their collaboration highlights how informal exchanges carry a depth of communication that is layered, complex, and profoundly relational.

At the centre of the work is a new sound installation built into a series of “singing pots.” Each ceramic vessel holds its own melodic rendering of the same voice, diffused through multi-channel sound. Together, they create an interlocking composition that shifts as listeners encounter variations in tone, phrasing, and timbre in real time. The result plays with the intimacy and volatility of the female voice—its ideals, fetishisation, mistrust—and resonates with Isobel’s own return to vocal performance after over a decade living with chronic pain.

Carla’s ceramics offer three large, tactile, imperfect pots with wide openings through which Isobel’s voice reverberates. When the voice emerges, it can be soothing, liberating, and sustaining, yet to some ears it may also seem unruly, unrestrained, or “too much”.

Carla and Isobel were drawn to collaborate not only through their practices, but through their shared commitment to community. Carla founded Common Clay, a space for collective making in ceramics, while Isobel founded Girls Twiddling Knobs, an online platform for women in music production. Both artists create spaces of connection and care, mirrored here in a work where ceramics and sound become vessels for conversation, solidarity, and creative exchange