This week Flick and I are back in London with artist Alma Berrow. Self-taught, Alma calls herself an artist who works with clay rather than a ceramicist. Her sculptural installations turn everyday objects into something humorous, surreal and quietly loaded: ashtrays, oysters, Ritz crackers, pomegranates, a lone gherkin placed beside a bowl of them.
We talk about how having no formal training became an advantage, why she still can’t make a vessel, and what she took from a three-month residency in Montana. We get into the point where her art career stopped feeling like play, her fear of becoming “Ashtray Girl,” and the stranger at a show who wondered aloud whether she’d turn out to be a one-trick pony.
Alma also shares how she found her way back to joy in the studio and the gallery owner who brought gender into a negotiation. She explains how months of research into myth and folklore become a full tablescape, including the one she’s building for her first solo booth in Miami this December.
It’s a conversation about making without an audience in mind, and about protecting the playful part of a creative practice once it becomes your job.
See Alma's work here, and her Instagram here.
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