For most of art history the pot has been the help. It stood in the corner, held what it was given, kept quiet, and let painting do the talking. Xanthe Somers builds pots that have opinions. Monumental, hand-coiled, riotously ornamented, they stand in the gallery the way someone stands in a doorway when the conversation is overdue.
Born in Harare in 1992, trained in fine art at Cape Town and then in postcolonial theory at Goldsmiths, Somers coils her vessels the traditional way — the slow, circling grammar of Zimbabwean pottery — and then interrupts them: surfaces punctured and woven, hung with sculpted flowers and brand emblems, dressed in gold lustre. The techniques she magnifies are the ones history filed under women's work — weaving, stitching, mending — scaled up until the filing system breaks.
The invisible hand
Her 2024 solo at Southern Guild in Cape Town, three oversized vessels made during the gallery's residency, was called Invisible Hand — Adam Smith's phrase, reclaimed for the hands the market never names: the cleaners, carers, mothers and makers whose labour holds households and economies together. This magazine once wrote in praise of the visible hand, the maker's mark left proudly in the material. Somers works the other side of the same argument — making invisible hands impossible to unsee.
A clotheshorse, fired
Her entry on this year's LOEWE Craft Prize shortlist — the series we have been following since Jongjin Park's win — is titled The Caretaker's Clotheshorse II: woven clay, glazed until it reads as fabric, a rack for drying laundry rendered permanent and monumental. Where Jane Yang-D'Haene gives the vessel memory and Espersen gives it weather, Somers gives it a job history. “We create utilitarian objects to serve us, but ultimately these objects tend to outlive us,” she has said. “These objects are not neutral… this legacy is not silent.”
The risk of the caption
Political craft carries a known hazard: the work can end up leaning on its wall text, a slogan with a glaze. Somers's insurance is labour itself. Weeks of coiling, weaving and firing cannot be skimmed the way a caption can; the argument is in the wrist, long before it reaches the title — though her titles, like Like Stale Bread After a Hard Day's Work, pull their weight too. The ornament is not decoration on top of the politics. It is the politics, worn openly, the way a uniform is worn.
London has noticed — her series Cleaner, Carer, Mother, Maker showed at October Gallery this year — and the vessels keep growing. The pot will outlive us; Somers makes sure that when it does, it testifies.