Meet the Maker Crafting Vibrant, Tactile Vessels as a Medium for Storytelling
Self-taught Zimbabwean artist Xanthe Somers uses clay and weaving to produce visually compelling forms that explore issues around women in the home and colonialism
At a glance, Xanthe Somers’s large, vibrant ceramic pieces exude optimism and joy. But the 33-year-old Zimbabwean native’s vessels are what she calls a “visual language” of her ongoing quest to “understand myself as a white Zimbabwean and the legacy of colonialism in Zimbabwe.” She explores the overlooked and undervalued labor of women in the home, using clay and cloth, and the symbolism of weaving as a vessel for storytelling.
“In Zimbabwe, the history of clay and weaving has been in the hands of women,” she says. “But it doesn’t hold the stories of women; it holds the stories of men. So I think it’s about trying to change that dialogue about how we weave these narratives.”
Now based in London, Somers left Zimbabwe at 18 to study painting and printmaking at Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. She was there during the Rhodes Must Fall movement, a student-led protest that began at the University of Cape Town and grew into a broader mission to confront institutional racism and decolonize higher education. The experience inspired her to move to London and pursue a master’s in post colonial culture and global policy at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She graduated in 2020, during the pandemic and a nonexistent job market. With so much time on her hands, she opened a studio and explored sculpting with clay—a practice she had taken up as a creative outlet in graduate school. “When I started with clay, it felt like such a moment of realization that this was my medium,” she recalls. “I love the versatility of it; it crosses all these boundaries of being functional or aesthetic. It is something from the ground, but it can also have such value.”
Somers started making “weird-looking vases and homeware-type things” but found little satisfaction in pieces “with no voice.” So she pivoted to work that used clay as a medium “to hold stories, hold narratives, hold water, hold ashes….to talk about human stories.”
Today the self-taught artist works from her studio in Herne Hill, crafting pieces that take at least two months to complete, with as many as six in different stages of creation in her studio at any given time. They begin as hand-coiled base shapes; she then punctures or weights the vessels to create asymmetry before hand-weaving the exterior.
The weaving, she explains, is “both metaphor and mnemonic device, referencing grass baskets while drawing from blankets, kitchen cloths, and other humble textiles that quietly signal care within the home.” After drying, each piece is fired, then meticulously painted over the course of a week, and fired again before it is ready to make its debut.
Her use of vibrant color is intentional, a way to draw people in, with the hope they will discover the context behind the works. The titles help—Fruits of our Forefathers, Working Class Femininity, Invisible Hand, Of Woof and Woe—but Somers knows the messages won’t resonate with everyone. What’s more urgently needed, she believes, is “art, in all forms, that creates space for a contemporary understanding of Zimbabwe, its present realities, identities, and complexities. And if audiences can be persuaded to care about anything, I believe this should be it.”
Xanthe Somers is represented by Galerie Revel in Paris, October Gallery in London and Southern Guild gallery in Cape Town, Los Angeles, and New York City.