11 October 2025 – 10 January 2026
William Cobbing: Despised Mud, I Love You
Free entry
Image: Dumbmud (2023) William Cobbing © the artist
Rooted in sculpture, William Cobbing’s work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance and installation. Clay is a central material in his practice, both in its raw and fired form.
‘Despised mud, I love you’ brings together new and existing work that uses clay to explore human interaction and emotional states. Performative encounters indulge in the physical tactility of the material, while fired sculptural works capture still moments of psychological inquiry. Often ambiguous in meaning, the figures that emerge appear to be caught in a state of metamorphosis, blurring the boundary between body and earth.
The title of this exhibition is a quote from the poem ‘Unfinished Ode to Mud’ by the French poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988). It speaks to William’s interest in clay as a transgressive material, which can provoke conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion in its wet, muddy, unformed state.
Installed in The Burton’s Ceramics Gallery alongside our historical collections, William’s work interrogates the timeless, primitive qualities of clay that have made it a vital material for human expression over thousands of years.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a performance and book launch for ‘William Cobbing: Social Substance’ in November 2025.
William Cobbing studied sculpture at Central St Martins, De Ateliers, and a PhD at Middlesex University. Recent solo exhibitions include Inner Horizon at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, USA; Janus Seasons at Selfridges, London, UK; and Social Substance at Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, UK. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions internationally and is represented in collections including the Arts Council Collection, the Wellcome Trust and Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. In 2021 he was awarded a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in The Netherlands and was awarded the Norma Lipman Artist Residency at Newcastle University in 2013.
