Shawanda CorbettNeighourhood Garden

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is proud to present Neighbourhood Garden, Shawanda Corbett’s first exhibition at the gallery. The works in the exhibition find their origins in a reflection on the artist’s experiences growing up, her memories of childhood and an appreciation of her community.

The ceramics explore common tropes from “the Hood”: characters that are often invisible or reduced to stereotypes. The desire is to give them a dignity and humanity that they seldom have in mainstream perceptions. The ceramics are in pairs: one suggesting the personality, the other the appearance of each character. The decoration on the body of the ceramics was painted to different jazz musicians’ music, in an intuitive and improvisational way: the patterns and shapes are the documentation of a dance performed by the artist around the ceramics. Luster and gold are employed to emphasize the worth and status of certain characters in the artist’s eyes.

The works on paper describe different episodes from childhood or youth: memories and experiences that are often shared, made even more precious by their universality.

Shawanda Corbett’s interdisciplinary practice addresses the question of what is a complete body, looking at the different cycles of a human’s life through cyborg theory. She uses her perspective as a woman of colour with a disability to root theory into reality. Corbett’s performances are developed in response to the architecture of the exhibition space. Collaborating with choreographer Albert Corbett, she sets up a live inner dialogue with her surroundings. Corbett’s performances incorporate her ceramics practice; the human body, architecture, and dance leave their traces on her ceramic vessels and surfaces.

Corbett is pursuing a doctoral degree in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and Wadham College, University of Oxford.