Stella Arion London, United Kingdom

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I am a London-based artist working with ceramic sculpture and site-responsive installation. My practice explores how bodies and material systems are shaped by pressure, time and transformation. Through clay, architecture, photography and bodily research, I investigate relationships between constraint and movement, vulnerability and resistance.

I am a London-based artist working primarily with ceramic sculpture, alongside site-responsive installation, photography and bodily research. My practice investigates how bodies and material systems are shaped by geological, industrial and psychological pressures. I am interested in how a form can carry evidence of constraint while retaining the possibility of movement and growth.

Working through slow, accumulative hand-building, I allow clay to register pressure, collapse, support and repair. My sculptures move between bodily, geological and industrial references: organic folds meet rigid planes, openings and interrupted structures. Rather than depicting the body directly, I explore how experience becomes embedded in weight, surface and posture. In my series ‘The Eye of Industrial Love’, these relationships address the ways systems of production and control become inscribed in bodies and matter.

Research takes place both within and beyond the studio. Fieldwork in the Atacama Desert and the Bolivian Highlands and Amazon has informed my attention to erosion, extraction and adaptation. In photographic and performative studies, I use my own body to investigate physical limitation, imbalance and support, translating these experiences into sculptural tension.

My practice has increasingly expanded from individual objects into site-responsive installations. I understand the body as our first skin and architectural space as a second skin: an environment that surrounds us, shapes our movement and affects how we feel. I am drawn to places whose physical and atmospheric presence has a powerful effect on people. I choose these sites for the dialogue that can emerge between sculpture, space and the human body, observing how each changes our perception of the others.

At The Crypt Gallery in London, placing ceramics directly on the floor of underground passages invited visitors to bend, crouch and encounter the sculptures at close range. Darkness, sound and the surrounding architecture became part of that bodily encounter. In ‘The Quiet Rupture’ at Alcova Milano, ceramic forms entered into dialogue with translucent industrial sheeting, concrete blocks, dust and a deteriorating interior, creating tensions between exposure and concealment, support and instability. For ‘Unheld’, developed for a tomb within Wells Cathedral and selected for Wells Art Contemporary 2026, I brought ceramic form into relation with a space already charged with histories of time, memory and mortality.

Through these relationships, I explore how sculpture can make pressure, vulnerability and adaptation physically perceptible. The same object can acquire different meanings in different places; installation becomes a way of researching how those meanings emerge through material, atmosphere and human presence.

I hold an MA in Ceramics & Glass from the Royal College of Art. My work has been exhibited internationally, including at Alcova Milano, CICA Museum in South Korea and Galleri Heike Arndt in Berlin and Denmark. In 2022, I received First Prize in the Charlotte Fraser Award and Second Prize in the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers Award.