Lydia Thompson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures combine architectural form with layered storytelling, exploring the porous, transitional nature of “home” as physical space and social construct. Her hand-built, perforated structures invite reflection on thresholds of movement, vulnerability, and resilience amid gentrification and migration. Drawing from Black diasporic material culture and personal histories, Thompson’s practice captures textures and traces left by displacement and urban change. Her ceramics embody “structured tenderness,” honoring both fragility and strength in spaces and communities experiencing transformation. Using symbolic color, embedded objects, and architectural motifs, evolving body of work—including the interconnected “Relics,” “House Beatings,” and “Mounds” series—serves as mementos of what has been lost and what endures.
Chenoa Baker: How does tenderness manifest in your hand-built, time-intensive sculptures? Is it part of the process? Is it related to memory and the personal?
Lydia Thompson: The tenderness of my work, which isn’t always read as tender, is rooted in personal and intimate references, which I use to contextualize the work into a more universal place. For instance, the installation Mumblings: After Hour Conversations, which includes a soundtrack of individuals recalling personal stories of migration and life during the civil rights movement, as well as their perspectives on social justice, started as a sculptural bird formation on an old side table. My grandmother had those tables, where people drop keys or leave candy, and they hold function and memory. They are tokens of migration; they also symbolize Black women and girls getting lost in history, and that it’s never too late to tell their stories.
I use birds instead of the figure to symbolize the migration of African Americans. The cluster of birds is made up of secondhand figurines, commercial slip-cast molds, and my bird sculptures fused with glaze, while the shape of the bird formation base relies on the design of the small tabletop. While working on one bird formation base, I used a kidney-shaped table with extremely thin legs that I purchased at an estate sale. I began building the structure using a slab on the table and began to raise the wall using the coil method. Unfortunately, the piece became too top heavy. Sometimes I break down a piece in progress if I foresee problems with the proportions, but with this piece, I kept going, and it became the first “Mound” piece.
Sometimes you have to listen to the material and do what it wants to do, not what you think it should do. The kidney-shaped tabletop provided an organic form that resembled a human torso curled inward. It felt human and architectural, like adobe. I wanted to alter the surface and maintain the humanistic physicality of the form, so I draped strips of clay vertically to show the form’s weight, thinking about siding and raffia—things that bend but protect the interior wall. I imagined: What if the landscape were the architect? What if homes were built by and for the earth, not imposed on it? That’s why the forms feel softer, more integrated with the environment, but still signify sheltering. I began opening some forms, thinking about breath and vulnerability. That was the first time I felt I was using my visual experiential vocabulary instead of borrowing, which felt sincere.
CB: You mention your repurposing of found ceramic figurines. Where do they come from? Do they also have a personal significance?
LT: Like the side tables, these figurines can be found at secondhand and antique stores. I am very familiar with these places through my grandmother, who frequently shopped at the Salvation Army. Her collection of tchotchkes and figurines sparked my interest. She worked as a domestic, seeing what was stylish in the homes she cleaned, then finding versions second hand. She would give me some of these figurines for Christmas, and later, I received all of her figurines, which I upcycled and used in my work. These ceramic objects have migrated too, recycled, passed down, lasting until broken. They were made to emulate the lifestyles of other cultures worldwide, and I imagined what the factories looked like, the personalities of the workers, and the geology/geography of the region. I was compelled to activate these objects and give them a new purpose.
My grandmother’s collection traveled with me over the years, from New York, Illinois, Virginia, and Michigan to Texas and North Carolina. After moving to Charlotte, I unpacked a few favorites and placed them around my house to create a sense of place and familiarity. Seeing the figurines every day, I felt an overwhelming connection to my grandmother’s understanding of independence and resilience. She inspired “Relics.” Born and raised in Mississippi, she relocated to Columbus, Ohio, as part of the Great Migration. When I was a little girl, she was evicted from her home after her second husband died. After surviving Jim Crow and rebuilding in the North, she was again displaced. That shook me. Displacement—especially for Black women—can destabilize an entire family. It’s still happening today. Abandonment and loss are everyday occurrences in society.
For me, the figurines speak of migration through their makers and ownership. I wanted to give them a second life and began embedding them into the open-wall house structures. Some I leave whole; others I break down, fusing them into the base with glaze. I see these forms as cradles—open and exposed. Openness means vulnerability, but also the potential for invasion. Using European figurines adds tension, referencing systems perpetuated by colonialism between cultures.
Thresholds matter, especially in the “Relics”—they mark the boundary between safety and instability. I found purpose by infusing my grandmother’s figurines into the series. At first, I was ambivalent about smashing them, but I found meaning in reclaiming ceramic objects made by blue-collar factory workers. It gave new meaning to porosity and the breakdown of barriers.
CB: Your work brings to mind Southern shotgun houses—using negative space and porousness instead of solid forms. During slavery, people hid prayers in gaps between wooden boards, and that thought resurfaced for me in your work. Can you talk about your choice to leave space in your structures?
LT: The works all stem from one idea—migration. Early forms such as the “Migration Cart” series, looked like carts or cradles on wheels, not houses. The wheels symbolize movement and transition. For a ceramicist, porousness can mean how low-fired clay absorbs water, but spatially it also means open forms, gaps, and negative space—both are valid. The absence or negative space represents time and movement, an imprint of something gone. The voids created by the lack of side walls enable viewers to observe the interior space and its contents, to imagine or relive experiences while the object is still. The floor between the walls serves as a cradle, platform, or stage where objects and rubble intersect in the meaning of mixed ancestries of someone’s past. Absence opens possibilities, suggesting scenarios without fixed conclusions. So, porousness means openness, but also uncertainty and potential change. Shards return; buried or discarded, they resurface in new forms. That’s why I embed figurines in clay—symbols of colonialism, domestic life, and memory. Some are whole, some broken.
CB: What visual or material clues do you pull from disappearing neighborhoods, buildings, or communal spaces? Are there sites or memories that haunt your practice?
LT: I’m drawn to small, overlooked remnants—what’s left in places touched by disinvestment and erasure. In my car, I pass by burned houses, vacant lots, rusted playgrounds, peeling paint, ripped screens, broken windows, crumbling stairs, curtains blowing through shattered frames, and fallen trees, and they linger. My father owned a rental house that we sold after he passed, and with it went generational wealth. It’s abandoned now, one of many homes that never recovered. As a kid, passing abandoned houses after curfew was unsettling; these structures held tension and a quiet danger, but I was also intrigued by what might be stirring about in the dark. When I drive through historically Black neighborhoods, I notice empty lots and vacant houses that have been boarded up. These physical changes are signs that the neighborhood has lost its identity and is in the process of gentrification. Displacement and time move with or without you.
In Salt (2022), the rough white exterior walls reflect the residue of saltwater. The interior floor is a pile of ceramic strips and shards that evoke building materials like wooden posts and rebar, as well as the straps used by enslavers to punish enslaved Africans. These straps carry the weight of history and erasure. There’s also a lingering sense of unpredictability—uncertainty about one’s future that hangs in the air. For many, stability is a dream, but it is not promised. My fascination with abandoned structures is rooted in African American history. The house forms sit on pallets—symbols of transit and instability. They suggest arrival, settling, and putting down roots, while also reminding us that these things can be taken away.
CB: Do your colors—yellow, blue, white, even red, white, and blue—hold significance?
LT: I use several palettes in my work, from neutral to bright, primary colors. I also use a crackle white bisque slip on top of the color designs and patterns for the color surface to be exposed through the thick slip. Hostile Passing and Passing Over #1 and #2 (2021) from the “Relics” series, were a response to the killings of Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland. I felt the need to express my feelings about these tragedies and the Black Lives Matter protests. The red, white, yellow, and blue represent ordinary homes, but the crackle white slip conveys vulnerability and violence, that something is broken. These women both died inside hypothetically “safe spaces”: the home and the police station. The slanted walls of the house structures represent the distortion of American culture’s disregard for African Americans. The thick, hollow walls reflect that: bulky exterior, peeling and broken interior, like stepping inside a vulnerable space. I balance bright, playful colors with heavy subject matter. That tension is intentional.
CB: Could you tell me more about the “Mounds?” How did you achieve their hollow and skeletal forms?
LT: My first source of inspiration for the “Mounds” series came from observing deteriorating structures while driving through the landscape. I imagine how the land has witnessed human abuse, waste, and the deterioration of these lived-in spaces. In this series, the landscape becomes the architect, designing and building structures that are more compatible with the natural world. “Mound” structures are organic, blending into the landscape as if nature itself used construction materials like aluminum siding or two-by-four beams. These forms offer a vision of sustainable housing, where humans and nature co-exist harmoniously.
The “Mounds” are constructed to activate both interior and exterior spaces. I begin with a base and use the coil method to build a hollow organic form, attaching slabs and more coils to the interior wall. Once the interior is complete, I apply strips of clay to form patterns that follow the curve of the piece. These strips reference manmade materials like aluminum siding, roofing tiles, and corrugated panels. The process is systematic—build a base or wall, layer the interior, then enclose the form—yet each one takes on a distinct personality. One piece has a collapsed interior held by two boards, with an intended sagging tension.
Midnight Dreams: Releasing the Shackles (2023) is built by connecting two hollow, coil-built shapes. I created a shell and simulated a two-story structure with partial walls and floors, as well as windows and openings that allow light to pass through and viewers to experience interior and exterior simultaneously. Understanding clay’s stages is essential, knowing when to manipulate it to capture a specific moment. Glazes, clay bodies, and kiln temperatures are all vital to my practice. This body of work is tied to my research in Nigeria, where I built traditional adobe structures, similar to forms in the American Southwest. I also drew from visits to caves, which shaped my understanding of spatial construction. I now see the “Mounds” as becoming human life-size forms filled with the voices of those they honor, though the size of my kiln limits their scale.
After assembling a piece, I test how far I can push the clay before it collapses. I slash the surface to evoke the feeling of being beaten by humans and the elements. This rawness gives the work its personality and sense of purpose. One piece draws on Beloved—I imagined what a bleeding barn might look like. The form opens to reflect pain, vulnerability, history, and shelter. One final “Mound” is inverted—turned upside down to test recognition. At that point, it’s broken beyond meaning. I pulled the walls as the clay firmed, releasing precision for rawness. Even distorted, it holds structure. The markings, indents, broken walls, and slashes reflect emotional abuse inflicted by political power structures that deprive communities of the resources needed for growth, wealth, and well-being.
CB: And what about the “House Beatings?”
LT: The “House Beatings” series focuses on hybrid house structures—partly based on enslaved homes on plantations and 1940s tract houses built to address the post-WWII housing shortage. Many textile mills also offered bungalow-style homes for employees. As job opportunities diminished, these homes were abandoned and deteriorated. I begin with cardboard templates to regulate scale and estimate how much clay I’ll need. I roll out slabs, cut shapes using the templates, and construct the house’s interior walls and floors before connecting the outer slabs. Once the form reaches the leather-hard stage, I begin to deconstruct it: cutting and pulling slabs apart, creating fragmented holes, and striking the clay with a rubber mallet. These actions create visible infractions—symbolizing pain, trauma, and structural failure. The tension between collapse and resilience is central to the work. The mallet becomes a tool of destruction and expression, reflecting the violence absorbed by these spaces and the memory embedded in architecture.
CB: Your work resists whitewashed gentrification narratives; instead, you tell the story architecturally—through what remains. What do you think about gentrification, especially now and in future imaginings?
LT: Gentrification is a slow process that sometimes repeats past patterns. It causes segregation because, although it boosts property values, original residents often cannot keep their homes. These systems don’t belong to one race; unstable housing is a problem everyone faces. There’s a lot to explore about how systems of gentrification work. It begins with controlling land and deciding who can live somewhere. As an African American, I’ve faced discrimination when buying a home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Some see gentrification as progress, others as erasure. In my neighborhood, new apartments are appearing everywhere. Longtime residents fear losing their homes. We’re not sure whether the housing is truly affordable. At its core, gentrification means change, often displacement. If equity existed, there wouldn’t be rundown homes or questions about repair affordability. We’d just fix them. But that world doesn’t exist.
In my hometown of Columbus, my elementary and junior high schools are now apartments. What happened to neighborhood schools? Why aren’t they preserved? I grew up in a working-class, integrated community—Black and white, blue-collar and office workers, folks from West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Deep South. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t violent either. We believed in a better world—the one that Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye sang about. Of course, just five blocks away, everything could look different. But I wonder: What if we went back to basics? Build schools. Let people own corner stores and run markets. Design communities based on real needs, not profit. Maybe it’s not just what we build, but how we build it. Architecture needs to shift toward generosity, softness, and community.
Lydia Thompson’s work is featured in “The South Arts 2025 Exhibition of the Southern Prize and State Fellows for Visual Arts” at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, through November 2, 2025.
