Strange Clay at the Hayward Gallery: a ‘punchy’ and ‘stimulating’ exhibition

Mankind has been shaping clay for “more than 12,000 years”, said Emma Crichton-Miller in the FT. We have used it to create everything from bricks and tools to ornaments, and the material bears a heavy “metaphorical load”: it even plays a key role in some “myths of human origin”. And while it was once looked down on by the art establishment, pottery is currently “booming”: in the world of contemporary art, the success of potters such as Grayson Perry is helping to overturn any snobbery once directed its way.

This new exhibition is an “extensive” survey of how artists around the world are exploiting clay’s potential to create weird and wonderful work that could not exist in any other medium. Bringing together contributions from 23 international artists, from the likes of Perry to virtual unknowns, it reveals how the material “can give strangeness expression”, and it can also make “the familiar strange”. The result is an extremely “impressive” show.

Much of the work here is “underscored by humour”, said Nancy Durrant in the London Evening Standard. Jonathan Baldock, for instance, fields a series of “vast totems exploring myth and folklore”, many of which are adorned with “casts of his own ears or hands” and “emoticons scattered about like ritual hieroglyphs”. Klara Kristalova, meanwhile, gives us a “thoroughly weird” installation of 18 stoneware figures featuring “plants with eyes” and “fairies with mushrooms for mouths”.

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Other works are “more austere”, if no less peculiar: Iranian-born Shahpour Pouyan gives us an “elegant” series of works based on “historic rooftops, rendered at small scale and displayed like so many soup tureens”. My favourite piece was David Zink Yi’s Untitled (Architeuthis), a dead giant squid, “exquisitely rendered in gleaming ceramic, its slimy glazes asking: is this ink or oil? Is that pollution or a natural secretion? If I get close to it, will it grab my ankle?”

A “dreary and pretentious” installation by the star potter Edmund de Waal is weak, though, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It consists of nine glass cases filled with “tiny ceramic cylinders” that supposedly communicate “a human presence, or a benign haunting”: it is “palpably ludicrous”. Yet, this misstep aside, the show is bags of fun.

There is real invention here, not least in a piece by Emma Hart that somehow makes ceramic tiles simulate the view through a wet car windscreen. Better still is Lindsey Mendick’s effort, which uses “a huge tonnage of painted clay to recreate an entire house being overrun by vermin” – octopuses emerge from the lavatory, while the kitchen is overrun with slugs “so huge they can wield a sushi knife”. It’s just one highlight of a “punchy event” at this “reliably stimulating” gallery.

Hayward Gallery, London SE1 (020-3879 9555, southbankcentre.co.uk). Until 8 January