There is a profound vulnerability in letting go of perfection, especially when your medium is as unforgiving as clay. In her debut solo exhibition, Between Scars & Totems, artist Naomi Nwaobi leans into this exact friction. Abandoning the pursuit of flawless mastery, she turns to the potter’s wheel to excavate something much rawer: the physical and metaphorical scars that shape us.

The resulting bisque-fired vessels are a striking departure from precision, favoring intuition over control. Through jagged voids and splintering cracks, Nwaobi poses a new line of thinking on what to do with the parts of ourselves and our experiences that are otherwise not filled with glee.

“How do we engage with things that hurt us? Is it possible to excise the scars that make us who we are with a delicate hand? What do we do with the parts of us we carve away?”

To accompany the ceramic pieces in the exhibition, Nwaobi created a short film capturing moments from the intimate, tactile process of bringing these forms to life. It is a beautiful look at the labor of healing, illustrating how the act of making mirrors the messy, necessary work of facing our deepest hurts head-on.

We are pleased to present this documentary. It is an invitation to witness Nwaobi’s surrender to clay, and perhaps, a prompt to reframe our own scars as totems of survival.