Artist Mella Shaw has been named as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial’s £10,000 Award – the UK’s largest prize for ceramics.
Her winning work, Sounding Line, is a large-scale sculptural installation which aims to expose the overuse of marine sonar and its devastating effect on deep-diving whale species.
Mella Shaw is a ceramicist and an environmental activist who uses themes of balance, tipping points, fragility and loss to raise awareness and inspire change.
Sounding Line is about the mass beachings of whales happening across Britain due to the increased use of marine sonar to search for enemy submarines and new oil reserves.
The immersive sensory work incorporates the bone-ash remains of a northern bottlenose whale that was beached on the west coast of Scotland in the clay used for the sculpture.
It is currently on show at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent, until 5 November.
Alun Graves, Chair of the Award selection panel and the V&A’s Senior Curator, Ceramics and Glass 1900–now said: ‘Mella Shaw’s ‘Sounding Line’ is a truly exceptional and remarkable work, powerful in concept and majestic in execution.”
Mella Shaw was selected from a 10-strong list of artists, all who have work currently on show at this year’s British Ceramics Biennial.
Four early career artists were also celebrated at the British Ceramics Biennial. Tim Fluck, Caroline Gray, Andrea Leigh, and Krzysztof Strzelecki were chosen from 25 artists exhibiting in the Biennial’s Fresh exhibition, which celebrates the new wave of artists working in clay.
All the winning artists from Award and Fresh will be invited to present new work in the 2025 British Ceramics Biennial.
The eighth edition of the British Ceramics Biennial, a six-week celebration of clay in Stoke-on-Trent, runs until 5 November 2023. Entry is free and more details can be found here.
