Clay is lifted and carried, then takes shape under the weight of experienced hands. For artist Phoebe Cummings, making is guided by movement: the body leaning in, bending and adjusting position as the material responds. Much of Phoebe’s raw clay work is formed directly on site, built over a defined period and holding its form only temporarily. The movement of her hands is captured for a brief moment in time by the material rather than resolved into permanence.
Now living and working in Stafford, Phoebe studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art. Although her training encompassed work with a range of materials, she found herself repeatedly returning to clay. What drew her in was its immediacy. “There’s the body and the raw material, and there’s nothing between that,” she says. “It’s this very physical interaction.” Clay offered a direct connection between thought and action, allowing ideas to move straight into finished form through movement.
Without access to a kiln or permanent studio after graduating, Phoebe began working with unfired clay, constructing installations on site and discovering the potential of working with a material that could be reused and infinitely reshaped. “If it’s unfired, clay can continually be reformed,” she says. This possibility fundamentally altered her relationship with making. “That really opened up the way that I could work. Very quickly it became part of what the work is.” The capacity to return to the same material allowed decisions to remain open, with form emerging through a free process, without the restriction of committing it to permanence.
Phoebe is drawn to clay’s variability and responsiveness, qualities that support an intuitive way of working in which plans remain loose. “There’s something quite forgiving about clay,” she says, noting how ideas often evolve in response to the material itself. Her practice allows for revision, collapse and return as part of the making.
Much of Phoebe’s work is in response to place. Over the years she has undertaken residencies across the UK, USA and Greenland, each environment feeding directly into the work made there. “The location often fed into the work, whether it was a museum collection or a factory, a sense of landscape or surrounding plants,” she says. These periods also offered time to test ideas through making, allowing material and site to guide decisions. “There was a lot of freedom. Rather than having the pressure of a finished exhibition, it allowed me time to experiment.”
At home, her garage functions as a workshop and preparation area, while she often makes smaller elements indoors during colder months. Larger works are rarely completed there. “I might pre-make parts of an installation,” she explains, “but usually it gets combined together on site with more material.” The home studio is a place of preparation, where ideas are explored before being brought into their final context.
Phoebe’s working days vary depending on the stage of a project. Installation periods are immersive, focused entirely on making, while the time between them is filled with preparation, teaching and other work that supports the practice. “When the making days come, that tends to be all I do,” she says. “No two weeks are the same.” Arriving at a new site involves adjusting to the space and how the body fits within it. “You arrive and you’re trying to figure out how things begin,” she says. “Then when you get into the making, that force just slows down.”
Across her work runs a deliberate tension between fragility and labour. Time is visible in repeated gestures and accumulated form, yet the finished piece may exist only briefly. “There’s a sense of beauty,” she says, “but also a tension with the raw material and the proximity to things collapsing or disintegrating.” The body remains present throughout. Hands leave impressions that are not concealed or sealed. “There’s no glaze that coats over that interaction with the body,” she explains. “It’s left exposed in some way.”
Scale alters how the body engages with the work. Larger installations require full physical involvement, with movement shaping form as much as the hands. Clothing becomes part of this exchange, chosen for ease. “You’re bending, you might be kneeling - there’s a lot of movement,” she says. “You’re aware you’ll get messy.” She often works without shoes, staying close to the material underfoot and containing the working space around her.
Where possible, clay is reused. Sometimes it is recycled by the host institution, other times, fragments are carried forward into new works, transformed until they are no longer recognisable. “It’s nice that there’s that possibility to carry it forward in a different way,” she says. “It becomes something quite different.”
To celebrate the TOAST Spring Summer 2025 Lounge collection, Phoebe has created a new sculpture and series of clay drawings on paper for TOAST Bath. A structure is woven from clay, supported by steel and jute rope, its rich texture evoking coral, moss or fibre. Phoebe is known for her durational sculptures and environments made from raw clay, and like previous works, her TOAST artwork is built directly into the space in which it is shown, with the material being reclaimed for future works.
The sculptures slowly enact their own performance, subtly shrinking, drying, cracking or dripping. Like garments, structures evolve over time in relation to the human body. The installation’s colour is produced by the mineral content of raw material, blending the deep warmth of iron oxide to the purity of white kaolinite.
The collaboration aligns closely with TOAST’s connection to materials. “There was a lot of freedom,” she says, “and also a connection with the TOAST approach to materiality - especially in its Lounge collection - noticing the different qualities, the different feeling you get from materials.” Although she does not work with textiles directly, Phoebe is attentive to the shared language across materials. “All materials have a feeling beyond just how they look,” she reflects. “I think so much about the body with the way I work, and garments are a huge part of that.”
Visit TOAST Bath to see Phoebe’s installation, Materiality, from Wednesday 14 - Wednesday 28 January. Discover our women’s loungewear collection.
Words by Alice Simkins Vyce.
Photography by Marco Kesseler.
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