Orly Kritzman works with clay as both a material and a storyteller. Based in London, she graduated with honours from Central Saint Martins’ BA in Ceramic Design (2023) and is now pursuing an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been shown at Arthouse1 (2018), Central Saint Martins (2023), and other venues.

With over a decade of experience in clay — and a background in theatre, film, writing, and design — Kritzman has found storytelling to be the thread that ties all her creative pursuits together. For her, clay becomes a narrative instrument that records disruption, resistance, and transformation.

Her sculptures are made and remade, broken and mended, scarred yet resilient. She often embeds minerals and organics into the clay, creating deliberate disruptions that act as both material and philosophical provocations. These traces form a kind of future archaeology — objects that hold psychological states and lived histories within their surface.

Much of her work speaks to cultural displacement and the search for belonging. Red clay recalls the landscape of her childhood, while porcelain captures the fragile translucency of existing between places. Presence and absence, silence and speech, belonging and estrangement — these tensions run through her practice.

Her work also carries a feminist charge. In pieces where words are written and then obscured, absence itself becomes eloquent, insisting on what is not said. By unsettling clay’s “grounding,” she aligns herself with a broader history of artistic resistance — from Dadaist disruption to civil disobedience — using fracture, silence, and repair as forms of rebellion.

Kritzman’s works embody anger, fear, and fragility, yet also the radical potential of repair. The scars they bear are both vulnerable and binding — reminders that transformation often begins at the site of rupture.

1. Ripple Verse Gallery (RVG) : Material as Metaphor and Memory: You describe using red clay that 'echoes the landscape of my childhood' while porcelain expresses the liminal state of 'being between two places.' Can you walk us through how you first discovered this profound connection between material properties and emotional geography? What was the moment you realised clay could carry the weight of displacement? how do they help you bridge the personal with the political?

   Orly Kritzman (OK): Terracotta is the colour of my childhood landscape, and is the clay from which most of the historical artefacts I grew with are made. It connects me not only to my own lived memories, but to my ancestors, to a history going back to pre religious and political divisions, creating a relationship which transcends that which I have with the country and connects me directly with the land. Using terracotta literally grounds me. However far and I am, I am always connected home. Porcelain represents for me the exotic, the high culture of the East and of Europe, the place I chose to live in, not just physically, but also as a state of mind. Being semi translucent it symbolises a sense of there-not-there, of never really belonging anywhere. It’s perceived fragility masks its strength and durability and speaks of the power one attains by allowing oneself to be vulnerable.

2. RVG: Future Archaeology: You’ve described your works as “future archaeology,” documents of both material and state of mind. If someone were to uncover one of your works hundreds of years from now, what truth about this time—and about you—would you most hope they would recognize?

   OK: I would like them to sense the struggle. I would like them to connect to the work in the same way that I hope current audiences do; finding an emotional hook on which they can hang their own experiences. The specifics of the works are unimportant. Who I am and why I made them is irrelevant. If the works manage to convey some of what I am feeling then they will create a connection. Art transcends language and culture as long as it makes you feel and think.

3. RVG: The Alchemy of Disruption Your practice involves using organics and minerals as 'agitators, instigators and disruptors' to adjust clay from within. This sounds almost like you're conducting material rebellions. What draws you to this idea of subverting from within, and how do you decide what foreign elements to introduce into your clay bodies?

   OK:Subversion is a form of rebellion. It is an act that declares non conformity. It is a way to take a stand against a reality that I can neither accept nor change. At a time when there is no control, I create a controlled chaos. The distortion is used to cause disruption, to be the voice of resistance, the anti-normal, the way to regain control through choice.

   Organics are used to create the skeleton of the form, which burn away in the kiln leaving ghostly traces, and minerals are used as an extension of the clay body - disrupting from within.

   The works start off as titles, and the materials I chose are there to embody the sensation I wish to convey.  Pushing the material beyond its ‘natural’ limits is a result of many years of methodical research and experimentation.

4. RVG: The Sound of Things Breaking: You quote Brian Eno about distortion becoming a medium's 'signature' and describe your work as embodying 'the sound of failure.' When you're in the studio pushing clay beyond its limits, what does that moment of breakdown actually feel like?

   OK:‘The sound of failure’ refers to the distortion interfering with the ‘perfect’. I find a lack of distortion to be inhuman. In my works I make the ‘anti-perfect’. Something that should feel right because we can relate to it; we can sense the process, the struggle, the emotion that has gone into it.  It is honest. Laid bare without filters.  

   Because I aim to embrace the chaos by creating it deliberately, the moment of breakdown does not really exist; there is a continual flow of experimentation with wonderful moments of discovery and disappointments. All of these become part of my library of material tools. Something that hasn’t worked out the way I thought it would, ends up being used in another work, or is filed away as not interesting enough.

   The sound of ceramics breaking is always one that resonates with a hushed anticipation. I find breaking work on purpose to be a proper rebellious act. Taking the perfect and reforming it, first with violence and then with the slow loving act of repair.

5. RVG:Choosing Your Silences: You make a powerful distinction between coerced silence as violence and chosen silence as resistance—like Gandhi's Satyagraha. In your own life, how do you navigate when to speak and when strategic silence serves you better? Has there been a moment where you had to choose between visibility and safety, and how did that choice influence the hidden words in your work

   OK: For a long time now I have had to be very guarded with my words. Everything I say has the potential to offend. The polarisation of stance has made communication most difficult. I find myself checking every word that comes out of my mouth, constantly reminding myself who I am speaking to and how they are politically aligned. The choice between visibility and safety is constant. Because of the emotional charge, I avoid confrontation. I do not wish to cause any further pain, nor to experience any myself. This need to be empathic has lead to doublethink. I no longer represent myself openly. I resist the need to agitate in order to question the world around me. This is an unnatural state of being, leading to a great amount of stress. Instead of protesting what I want to fight against, I protest not being able to speak, joining the unfortunately long tradition of women being silenced. I write words which are redacted, hidden, jumbled up. My vessels are bound; subverting the act of healing and protection into binding and restraint. The emphasis is no longer on the context but on the gagging of the speaker.