Twice Through the Fire: A Reckoning with Umar Abdulrasheed ‘s Two Ceramic Vessels
By Athi Mongezeleli Joja
Ceramics has mostly embraced the tradition of firing a piece twice; the first is to harden it, then the second locks the colour permanently. Umar Abdulrasheed’s two vessels seem to embody that idea. Born from the same body and the same hand, they pass through the kiln together, only to emerge at the very end as two distinct forms.
When placed side by side, the resemblance is unmistakable. Both vessels stand around eight by eleven inches; both rise from narrow bases into broad, barrel-shaped bodies covered in dense ridges and pinched textures that make the clay feel almost like coral or scorched earth. Their openings are equally striking. They both do not have a formed mouth but rough, broken edges that feel more like wounds than openings. Rather than inviting us to fill them, the vessels seem to ask us to investigate what has been left exposed.
The tear is not an accident of the wheel nor a body giving way under its own weight. Abdulrasheed cuts it deliberately, changing how the vessel is read. What first appears broken begins to feel intentionally opened, like soil turned by a spade or rock exposed by a quarry. Because the clay was dug and fired in Africa, on land that carries its own history, that gesture sits underneath everything else in the work. The opening therefore becomes more than a formal choice. It feels like an invitation into the story held within the material.
It is through colour that the two vessels separate totally. One carries a deep, weathered teal that settles quietly into its rough surface, suggesting water, erosion, and time. The other is coated in a sharp ochre yellow that feels hotter and more restless. On the same torn and cratered body, the yellow seems to resist the form rather than settle into it. The teal reads as something the earth made slowly, while the yellow reads as something still burning. Together, they create a tension between calm and unrest, coolness and heat, as though the same earth is speaking in two different moods.
Both surfaces are finished in a fired engobe, which lays over the built texture rather than becoming part of it, and this is the one place the work still feels unfinished. This creates a slight distance between the colour and the form, making the surface feel more applied than developed through the firing. Allowing the colour to gather in the crevices, break around the torn edges, and reveal traces of raw clay could give the surface more depth and allow it to carry the same sense of history the way the form already does.
What a viewer misses without the context is the story underneath the surface. Seen cold, with no title and no explanation, these read as two well-made, roughly textured vessels in varied colours, good-looking enough on their own terms but not obviously in conversation with each other. Told that they were fired from the same African clay, torn open on purpose, and made twice from one intention, they become much harder to shake off. Few makers working in clay right now move this comfortably between two very different disciplines, the physical craft of building and firing a form by hand, and a set of concerns land, extraction and inheritance, that usually belong to writing rather than to pottery.
Abdulrasheed is doing both in the same object, and Twice Fired becomes more than a study in form; it becomes the clearest sign yet of how far the combination can carry the work.