New Acquisition: Ranti Bam, Iwa. Contemporary Art Society Griffin Award.

The Crafts Study Centre (CSC) has acquired Ranti Bam’s ceramic work Iwa, 2025, which is now on display in its ground floor gallery in Farnham. The work is the culmination of a residency in March-May 2025 that saw Bam explore the CSC collections and then produce a new work in response. This was undertaken in the Ceramics & Glass workshops of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in adjoining buildings on the Farnham campus.

Bam spent time in the CSC Research Room with the textile collections and the block printed samples of twentieth century designer Enid Marx in particular. In the UCA workshop Bam deployed her signature slab-building techniques, pressing painted slips onto red earthenware through canvas to create textured monochrome surface patterns. The latticed top, multiple clay punctures and mounds, round base, colourful interior, and glaze seeping through seams of slab sections make for a pot rich in narrative and drama, with patterns drawing from Marx’s designs.

The work was commissioned from the artist by the Contemporary Art Society with the support of the Griffin Award and the CSC Trustees. A film by Abbe Fletcher of the completed work has been commissioned and will be released later in 2025. Bam’s work will be on display at the Crafts Study Centre until April 2026. The CSC would like to thank Ranti Bam for the work and her commitment to the residency, the vital role played by Ceramics & Glass technicians at UCA (Susan Atwill and Jane Harris), and the wider team at CSC, UCA and the Contemporary Art Society.

For full press release - click here.

Link to Contemporary Art Society announcement here.

Photographs of Iwa courtesy of the artist and the Crafts Study Centre. Photograph of Ranti Bam working on Iwa at the Ceramic & Glass workshops of the University for the Creative Arts. Courtesy of the artist and the University for the Creative Arts.

Ranti Bam is a British-Nigerian artist that employs a range of ceramic techniques – throwing, slab building, slip decoration – to produce tall, fluid forms that incorporate a variety of surface effects. The work is rich in narrative, drawing on what she refers to as ‘the semiotics of the feminine,’ informed by craft cultures in Lagos, London, and elsewhere. She received an MA from the CASS and a diploma in ceramics from City Lit (both in London). Bam’s work is represented in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and she has undertaken a number of residencies, including at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2020-21), Newcastle University where she was the Norma Lipman Ceramics Fellow (2023), and most recently at Black Rock, in Dakar, Senegal (2025).