Amelia Lockwood Pocket

Morán Morán is pleased to present Pocket, Amelia Lockwood’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition unfolds as a constellation of ceramic sculptures arranged around a central table of jars and vessels. At first glance, the works appear to draw from the ornamental excess of the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, characterized by elaborate surface detail, pastel palettes, and sinuous forms that spilled outward into space. Nature was rendered as decorative excess: vines, foliage, and mythological scenes meticulously depicted to suggest abundance, pleasure, and a distinctly human mastery over the natural world.

However, Lockwood engages this visual language only to quietly undo its hierarchy. Rather than gilded flourishes and airy coloration, her sculptures are grounded in a palette drawn directly from the earthen origins of the ceramic itself: burnt reds, muted browns, and ashen grays. Gold is stripped of its decorative predominance and replaced by glazes that emphasize time, weight, and tactility. These surfaces pulse with texture: coiling vines, clustered berries, and lattice-like structures emerge not as ornate gestures but as records of touch, pressure, and process. These forms foreground their material histories, emphasizing the clay’s connection to the environment from which it is extracted.

Space within Pocket expands and contracts through these gestures, but unlike Rococo’s theatrical dissolution of boundaries between heaven and earth and different realms of power, Lockwood proposes a quieter mixing of worlds. Whether in the phase shifts of the water cycle, the destruction and renewal brought about by tectonic shifts, or interwoven symbioses of the environment, these ceramics reveal that the flux of nature itself is transcendence. Pocket suggests that the architectures fashioned by human hands are inevitably drawn back into nature’s domain, not as triumphs over it, but as temporary permissions granted by it.

Amelia Lockwood (b. 1990, Stroudsburg, PA) is an artist who primarily works with ceramic to produce sculptures that reference sites of collective exchange: celestial, geological, psychic, and architectural. She received her BFA from Syracuse University (2012), completed post-bac studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2016), and received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of California, Los Angeles (2020). She lives and works in Los Angeles.