An artist’s choice of medium is a political one. Avant-gardists throughout history have toyed with the hierarchy of medium, ditching bourgeois painting and sculpture for less academic practices such as collage, printmaking and photography. As technological advances accelerate, contemporary artists are met with the immense challenge of “keeping up with the times”. Yet despite the digital art craze, there are some artists standing defiantly in opposition, whose M/O is, above all, to get their hands dirty. In recent years, clay — a material as old as art itself — has been seeping its way into the contemporary art world thanks to innovators, who are seeking to “re-shape” our preconceived notions of the material. Here, we profile five influential ceramic artists who are exchanging function for form and the title of artisan for artist. In examining their work, it’s clear that the world’s most ancient art form is anything but over.

Ramesh Nithiyendran

Although he’s a self-taught ceramicist, Ramesh Nithiyendran heralds from a painting background. He believes that his roots in painting have allowed him to understand “the formal relationships that exist when you’re making a ceramic object”. Nithiyendran makes installations reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s combines, but with a neo-primitivist vigour that evokes Basquiat — his masterful command over texture, surface, colour and transparency elevate his work from the earthy to the divine. As an artist, Nithiyendran harnesses the fluidity of the medium to provoke a conversation around the body and sexuality. His fearless exploration of the carnal and cosmic results in the construction of deities and anti-deities with an emphatically bold presence, commanding fear and respect all at once.

Brian Rochefort

Though initially accepted to art school for printmaking and drawing, Rochefort’s decision to pursue ceramics was partially inspired by the medium’s lack of popularity. “I thought it was an underrated material at the time and that I could push its boundaries a bit.” His unique ability as an artist hinges on his use of order to create chaos — his vessels seem to implode and explode simultaneously, like alien sea corals fighting the laws of physics. Rochefort draws inspiration from geological forms everywhere, from the Galapagos to East Africa, pulling from the familiar and rendering it extraordinary. Shapes that resemble conglomerations of snot, semen, mould, dust and dirt are made alluring due to Rochefort’s command over colour and combination.

Cristina Tufiño

Tufiño “thinks conceptually about material” and lists clay as just one of the many tactile materials she uses in her practice. Tufiño is known for her surreal sculptures in tropical gradients, which elegantly distort familiar forms. Drawing from a colourful pool of Brazilian, Mexican and Puerto Rican references, Tufiño defamiliarises corporal forms and personifies objects in order to construct new idols and effigies. Her Freudian “combines” harness the power of the uncanny and evoke the dreamlike and surreal. Tufiño is a self-described “archeologist hoarder”, whose sculptures invite viewers to decipher “riddled mythical narratives”. Her aesthetic draws from the virtual world and more closely resembles CGI graphics than your average kiln-fired urn.

Diana Rojas

Diana Rojas’ work is a witty reflection of fashion’s “hype” culture. Her surprising ability to recreate this season’s trendiest footwear out of clay has garnered her significant attention from both the art and fashion worlds. Her manual dexterity generates a striking incidence of trump l’oeil, forcing sneakerheads and hypebeasts to do a double take. As enjoyable as her work is on a surface level, her sculptures beckon broader questions around consumerist culture and the principle of commodity fetish. Drawing on the legacy of Duchamp, Rojas eliminates the function of her chosen footwear, thereby glorifying its pure form. Ironically, Rojas is frustrated by her audience’s incentive to put her artwork to use. “I think a lot of ceramics are deemed unworthy if they aren’t functional. People are more open to accepting ceramic as vessel as opposed to sculpture”. Rojas would like to let the record show that her shoe sculptures are not planters, and never will be.

Seth Bogart

Queer punk icon Seth Bogart is a quite literally a pottery class drop-out. Bogart was first inspired to explore the medium after seeing the work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkiss. His practice is a tactile manifestation of his wonderfully flamboyant universe — one that is characterised by the intersection of humour and an expression of queer identity. After all, Bogart’s retro, flamboyant aesthetic pays tribute to his idol and muse, John Waters. In ceramic, Bogart reinvents everyday objects, making them all the more merry by his embracement of the wonky and imperfect. In explaining how his ceramic pieces have changed over the years, Bogart says, “Most of my new work is pretty perverted”. In his hands, sex and fetish items are rendered silly and inviting, transformed from the illicit into the cartoon. The joy of Bogart’s artwork lies in its radical candour and joyous sense of subversion.