Iwa (2025) is a site-specific work that is the culmination of a residency in March-May 2025 that saw Bam explore the CSC collections and then produce a new work in response. It was undertaken in the Ceramics & Glass workshops of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in adjoining buildings on the Farnham campus. She also spent time in the CSC Research Room with the textile collections and the block printed samples of twentieth century designer Enid Marx in particular. Bam deployed her signature slab-building techniques, pressing painted slips onto red earthenware through canvas to create textured monochrome surface patterns. The latticed top, multiple clay punctures and mounds, round base, colourful interior, and glaze seeping through seams of slab sections make for a pot rich in narrative and drama, with patterns drawing from Marx’s designs
Bam’s work is represented in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and she has undertaken a number of residencies, including at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2020-21); Newcastle University where she was the Norma Lipman Ceramics Fellow (2023); and Black Rock, in Dakar, Senegal (2025).
