A hush of presence filled with echoes of homes remembered, stories untold, and clay still warm from the hand. IN BETWEEN | 两极之间 (July 9-15), the latest offering from Nova Ma, doesn’t try to dazzle at first glance. Instead, it waits, like the soft pause before a breath, inviting you into its shifting depths. Inside the bustling communal space of Deptford’s Ceramics Studio Co-op, Ma has carved out a world of slow-burning, beautiful enigmas that stay with you long after you’ve left.
There is something ungraspable here, fluid and moves between opposites: tension and ease, belonging and estrangement, stillness and change. Suspend! the first body of work, sets the tone with ceramic sculptures that seem to linger mid-action: a twisted arc of glazed stoneware a breath away from collapsing (or flying); another piece stretches diagonally, as if resisting an invisible pull. They hang like softened tools, glazed in tones of chalk and bone, their delicate forms vibrating with concealed energy. Ma refers to them as emotional architectures that hold the weight of waiting, anticipating connection or rupture. Their fragility is a register of care — each curve, crack, and pause holding the imprint of a slow, intentional hand.
The next body of work, Narratives of Belonging, deepens the conversation and shifts the focus from emotion to material history. Here, memory is held in the discarded: fragments of wood laminate, broken tiles, and flaking wallpaper salvaged from shops, restaurants, and council flats in the surrounding South London neighbourhoods. These fragments are embedded into slabs of glazed stoneware, forming layered compositions that feel like excavated walls or disassembled rooms. One standout work depicts a domestic scene in front of old windows, its surface layered with glazed streaks mimicking aged water marks, a kind of ghost architecture. Others resemble old monuments
and floorplans, mapping spaces no longer accessible. Through this reassemblage, Ma reflects on how materials shape our understanding of space, memory, and belonging.
The site-specificity of Ma’s work is not incidental, as they are created in conversation with the people and spaces surrounding her. In the months prior to the show, she led a series of clay workshops, inviting local residents to bring in domestic materials and personal memories. Many of these offerings made their way into the final pieces, quietly stitching a collective voice into the work. There is a generosity here that resists the polished isolation of the white cube, a willingness to let others’ hands leave their mark.
This ethos of collaboration carries through to the final section of the exhibition: Formless Anthology, a zine-based project made in partnership with poet Suiwu Su. Here, language becomes sculpture. The zine, loose, folded, overlapping, unfurls across a rough wooden table. Su’s poems, written in English, Mandarin, and moments of linguistic slippage, drift between abstraction and atmosphere; and through Ma’s practice of clay, redefined the notion of physical, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Some poems spill across the page like a wave, others fold themselves into quiet whispers. The layout is intentionally unstable — there is no one way to read it. Like the rest of Ma’s work, meaning emerges not through control but through relation — shifting, unfinished, held lightly.
What lingers most is the softness of Ma’s approach. These are not grand declarations, but small, caring gestures. Clay becomes memory, resistance, intimacy. IN BETWEEN doesn’t ask you to look; it asks you to stay. To listen. To feel the weight of a broken tile, the echo of a mother tongue, the stillness before a door is closed.
In a world rushing towards certainty and standardisation, Nova Ma wanders in the in-between — and invites us, gently, to join her there.
