Still Lives presents a selection of new ceramic sculptures made from Cool Ice porcelain, glaze and lustre by Alex Bray. To secure a particular artwork, please contact us via the enquiry button below.
”There is room for a lightness to lift us, even as I explore darker themes of personal and universal loss and absence. Lightness is a sensibility that pervades my work, and I am exploring it both materially and conceptually. I work in fine porcelain, high-fired to luminosity and finished with lustrous opalescent reflective glazes. This is how the light gets in.
Italo Calvino, in his essay ‘Lightness’, talks about ‘the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living’, understanding our need for joy to live positively. Calvino is seeking lightness without escapism amidst chaos in our environmental, political and social systems. My work seeks to explore how to deal with challenging times without losing sight of the things that bring joy to life. This sense of lightness is evident in my contemporary still lives, treading the line between playful exuberance and contemporary commentary. These works exemplify this duality, leaning on 17th century allegorical use of flowers, fruits and domestic objects while updating these motifs to reflect modern societal concerns, particularly environmental degradation, consumerist excess and horribly, the reality of war.
This tension between the human and natural world is central to my work; nature is allowed to refloresce over the built environment, often overwhelming the constructed to a point of obscurity. Motifs of consumerism, war, technology and mass production are feminized through the use of pearlescent flora, evoking the protective elements of nacre/mother of pearl. This reflects the deep ecology perspective of unification between humans and nature, expressing the conviction that we are all one, an ethics of co-existence, which brings about a respect and empathetic engagement with nature. The work both speaks to the troubling realities of the contemporary world and suggests an antidote, a form of resistance through engagement with beauty.”
– Alex Bray on Still Lives, 2026
