Phoebe Collings-James was born in London, England into a British-Jamaican family in 1988, graduating in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University in 2009. Her art, encompassing ceramics, painting, and video investigates themes of violence, grieving sexuality, beauty, and desire.
Multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Collings-James was born in London, England into a British-Jamaican family in 1988. She embarked on a modelling career as a teenager, facing significant challenges as a mixed-race model, particularly in London. Castings were solely for black models and her fair skin tone was a hurdle: at the time, black models were portrayed in a highly exotic manner, but she fitted neither into the black category nor the white. During her time in fashion, she began ‘to form ideas on what I thought feminism was, and what being was, and it really seemed to conflict with everything I was experiencing as a model’ (Betker 2014). Collings-James began to study art when she was 16. She vividly recalled her first visit to the Louvre in Paris, where she was ‘horrified’ because these 'old oil paintings of white men’ did not reflect her own identity (Gore 2016). It was only when a teacher introduced her to the works of Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer, Adrian Piper, and Sonia Boyce that she finally felt a sense of belonging. British feminist artist Nina Edge also served as an important influence.
In 2009, she graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, while also working as a part-time model to fund her artistic endeavors. She was subsequently the first female artist in residence at the Still House Group in New York, USA where her solo exhibition, Pleasure Pieces, was presented in 2012. Her art, encompassing ceramics, painting, and video, investigates themes of violence, grieving sexuality, beauty, and desire. Additionally, she creates sensory environments that propose novel ways of perception and interpersonal connection. Her fascination with ceramics was sparked after participating in the Nuove residency in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, in 2014, a programme teaching young artists from around the world how to create new works using the medium of ceramics. The subsequent exhibition, Choke on Your Tongue, at the Italian Cultural Institute, London, featured new pieces focused on Collings-James' ongoing explorations of language, communication, and sexuality. Among the most compelling and unsettling works was a collection of ten flesh-coloured tongues titled Lingua (2014), scattered on a low, white plinth, and Medusa (2014), where smaller red flickering tongues erupted from an ambiguous torso-shaped vessel struggling to contain them. Curator Jareh Das observed that Collings-James' ceramic sculptures possess ‘fleshy, organ-like, slippery and sexual qualities’, adding that ‘fluctuating as specimens and relics, [they] deconstruct the human form into fragmented parts revealing at times a distorted but familiar anatomy’ (Das 2021).
Collings-James' work with ceramics incorporates concepts of 'orality', expressed in unique forms, including pierced structures, cavities and phallic designs, creating an intense sexual tension. Her focus on the mouth, with its representative wide-open holes in many of her pieces, metaphorically symbolises a suppressed voice, conveying notions of confinement, repression, and suffocation. These voids are conceived almost violently, generating a profound sense of tension and bewilderment. When creating her paintings, Collings-James adopts a markedly physical method, whether spreading oil paint on an unmounted canvas with her body, crushing eggs beneath her feet, or stepping on ivory black pigment and leaving footprints traced in it. Collings-James's captivating sound installation, Primordial Soup, featured in her New York exhibition, Expensive Shit (2017), explored the dynamics of diaspora and transformation and included recorded discussions with her British grandmother and Jamaican great-aunt, along with vocal contributions from singer Amanda Khiri. The artist affirmed that 'to gain understanding in our experiences of identity, we must acknowledge the disorder. My objective was to discover a method to discuss my specific roots, and the only feasible way to do that was through a complex blend of occasionally conflicting sounds' (Natale 2017). In 2018, Collings-James was artist‐in‐residence at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge. In 2021, she was awarded the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship, enabling her to spend six months at the Camden Art Centre, London, creating new work that was later displayed in the exhibition A Scratch! A Scratch! (2021). One of the most remarkable pieces was Subtle Rules the Dense, a series of masks/torsos/body plates that she formed from mannequins and then further refined by hand. The finished objects, meticulously decorated with etchings, imprints, and braid patterns, ambiguously straddled the line between a representation of a human torso and a shamanic mask. In 2022 she participated in Body, Vessel, Clay at Two Temple Place, London.
Collings-James contributes to community forms of art creation through her participation in the Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.), an art-oriented collective founded in 2018 for queer, trans, and non-binary Black people and people of colour, which was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. Additionally, she runs Mudbelly Ceramics, a space offering free ceramics courses for Black people, taught by Black ceramicists. Collings-James is based between New York and London. In the UK public domain her work is represented in the Arts Council Collection.