In a sprawling gallery at Arthshila’s new space in Delhi, a group of children excitedly drip blue ink onto handmade clay tiles, watching in wonder as the absorbed ink settles into interesting shapes. They’re not being naughty—they’re engaging with Astha Butail’s interactive work, Porosity of Tradition, in Common Ground, the second edition of the Indian Ceramics Triennale. As visitors dribble patterns of dots, lines and splatters onto the fired white tiles, they leave traces of their presence and transform the work. Butail’s work epitomises the spirit of the exhibition, which consolidates diverse approaches to clay-based practices while acknowledging their shared materiality. The Triennale is curated by a team of eight artists and curators—Anjani Khanna, Kanika Anand, Madhvi Subrahmanian, Neha Kudchadkar, Reyaz Badaruddin, Sangeeta Kapila, Sharbani Das Gupta, and Vineet Kacker—and is on display at Arthshila Delhi until March 31, 2024.

The Triennale’s first edition, Breaking Ground, showcased at Jaipur’s Jawahar Kala Kendra in 2018, sought to establish a platform for the presentation of contemporary ceramics. That intention continues to shine through, the curatorial vision of Common Ground acknowledges the range of contexts in which artists and artisans work with clay. There are works by hereditary potters from Kumbhar families who largely supply products to their local economies, their relationship with clay defined by market trends and climate change. Some structures are ephemeral by design, like the bithooras, intricately sculpted towers of cow dung patties that serve as fuel stores in rural communities. The bithoora on display is a collaboration among the Ugandan sculptor Lilian Nabulime, British artist Andrew Burton, and Hema Devi and Pinky Devi, who both come from dairy farming communities bordering Delhi.

The works on display make meaning of clay at various points in its lifecycle. The South Korean artist Yeesookyung shows a 2023 work from her series Translated Vase (2002-), a transmogrified porcelain sculpture pieced together from remnants of traditional Korean pottery. Traditional ceramic masters safeguard the value of their masterpieces by destroying any vases with minor defects. Yeesookyung turns the discarded fragments into absurdist assemblages, sheathing all cracks in gold. We see familiar shapes oriented in unlikely ways—the mouth of a vase stoppered by another pot, or the spout of a teapot protruding outward, towards the viewer.

If Translated Vase corrals discarded pots into a strange afterlife, the American clay artist Kate Roberts loops back to the beginning with her site-specific installation—The Space in Between, a porcelain gate in unfired clay. Like a giant string instrument suspended in space, rows of nylon thread roughly coated in unfired clay descend sharply from the ceiling. Gates are foreboding physical structures, with the power to restrict our access to different spaces or contexts – but Roberts’ installation is simultaneously strong and fragile—a looming barrier suspended in space, fragile and sensitive to touch, at the mercy of everything it encounters. And the end is in sight—once the exhibition ends, the gate will be cut down and the clay recycled.

Many of the artists draw from history and memory to reflect on the present. Indian artist Awdhesh Tamrakar revisits his origins in the Thathera community of metalsmiths by creating a visual history of their erstwhile 19th-century abode, Pancham Nagar, in northern Madhya Pradesh. In a work from his series, A Land of Silent Echoes, Tamrakar creates an effective map of the spaces his ancestors inhabited, invoking their craft in his use of brass and mild steel on tile, and also their presence, through the topography of natural and built environments he orchestrates. The work unfolds at scale, taking up an entire wall, but zooming in, you find endearing detail in the jagged ceramic cut-outs and fragments that become focal points in how you ‘read’ this visual history.

Meanwhile, for interdisciplinary artist Kushala Vora, the memory of place resides in a poem, Rabindranath Tagore’s Where the mind is without fear, which many schoolchildren in India learn to sing or repeat dutifully. Growing up in Panchgani, a hill station with a colonial past, Vora, the poem gestures to metaphorical freedoms that weren’t mirrored in her daily life. This precarious state of articulating freedom yet embodying fear is mirrored in her installation By Heart, a mountain of intricately balanced porcelain chips stained with words from Tagore’s poem and a poem she writes in response to his.

We need home projects, not housing projects, Prithwiraj Mali advocates in Home for the Homeless II, a terracotta and iron jigsaw where the idea of ‘home’ does not take on a singular shape or dimension. ‘Home’ is a chaotic entity, waiting to be harnessed into collective groupings – both in Mali’s work and in how we imagine urban spaces in the wake of growing human displacement and climate change. As Mali’s work demonstrates, finding ‘common ground’ is not the pursuit of homogeneity but learning to work with differences in a constantly evolving negotiation with space and time.