Meet the Maker Hand-Coiling Ceramic Sculptures Rooted in Black History
For ceramicist Paul Briggs, clay is art, salvation, and spirituality rolled into one awe-inspiring medium
The latest ceramic sculptures by Paul Briggs use knotted coils that don’t just suggest connection, they physically hold the pieces together. “In this present series, they are doing the work,” he says of Gravity, a new collection that marks a shift in his practice. In earlier pieces, the knots were symbolic. Now, as he explains, there isn’t something hidden inside the structure keeping it intact—the knots themselves bear the weight.
Briggs connects those coils to Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that we are “inextricably bound to one another.” Here, the metaphor has become literal.
Pinching, once something he did while his slabs stiffened, has become its own discipline–a regular “nightcap,” he says. “You have to pay attention to every pinch or else you’ll just rip that clay away from the whole,” states Briggs, who estimates he’s pinched several thousand pieces in his storied career. Designers including Brian McCarthy, Kelly Behun, Alex Papachristidis, and Victoria Hagan have taken notice, discovering his work at New York gallery Liz O’Brien.
Briggs grew up in Newburgh, New York, the son of a Baptist pastor. His mother died when he was seven. He drew constantly (first lines and shapes, later copying cartoons from Heavy Metal and MAD magazines) and was often in trouble at school. In high school, a ceramics teacher let him slip into the studio when he was supposed to be elsewhere, and it became both a refuge and a focus.
It also set him on a path with a few unexpected turns. He has earned five degrees (one bachelors, three masters, and one PhD) in subjects ranging from ceramics to art education, art theory, and biblical literature. He pastored a historically Black congregation in Bedford Hills, New York for a decade, running youth programs and starting a prison ministry, before returning fully to the studio. Today he teaches ceramics at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where he is only the second full-time tenure track Black professor in the school’s ceramics department.
For Briggs, clay is where the thinking and meditation happens. For many years, his slab-built works were where he “philosophized in concrete,” building forms that took on social issues. His 2018 Cell Personae series was birthed after he moved to Minnesota just days before Philando Castile was killed. The work confronts mass incarceration directly in forms that draw inspiration from actual prison cells.
After reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and reflecting on his own experiences visiting prisons as both a pastor’s son and later as clergy, Briggs realized his creations should not be pristine, instead producing black shapes with rough seams and intentionally uneven surfaces. However, he is reluctant to label his themes as explicitly social-justice, not because he doesn’t believe in it, but because “that content in my head was so painful all the time.”
Currently, Briggs is working on a new series called Small Dwellings: hand-sized black forms, no more than three-five inches in any direction, built from simple geometry with openings that beckon viewers for a closer look. Teaching and ministry are still a vital part of his practice.
“Teaching clarifies your thinking. It demands presence. It pushes you to become the person you hope your students will be,” he says. “I want my students, as the painter Kandinsky wrote, to be the creative ‘prophets’ in the world. People who can see the direction that society needs to go and do their part to move the ‘obstinate whole forward’ through their creative efforts.”