Untitled (2001), a cluster of COUNT oblong globules, descends from above. The hand- modeled ovoid forms of matte, unglazed red and black fired clay reveal gently raised and pointed concentric circles at their ends, resembling varied tones of brown skin and nipples. The pendant sculpture was among Simone Leigh’s earliest body of work following an artistic hiatus that commenced with the birth of her daughter in 1996. At that time, the artist recalled, “I […] began using chicken wire and metal armatures to hold things together, and hanging pieces from the ceiling.”1 Exhibited in 2001 at the former Rush Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, this and other works shown there were recalled by one collector as “large vessels in […] breast forms,” and by a critic as “a hanging, chandelier-like clay sculpture.”2

Informed by Leigh’s training in and dedication to hand-built ceramics, particularly the clay vessels made and used by women all over the world for the purpose of collecting and storing water, the work’s naked clay with occasional marks and blemishes bears the markers of “artifact” or “ethnography” that Leigh has riffed on throughout her oeuvre.3 Yet, the globules have shape-shifted, taking on guises with other processes and mediums.

Leigh echoed the terracotta sculpture’s forms and chandelier effect by translating this concept into glass as shown in 2004 alongside her work, White Teeth [For Ota Benga] (2001- 2004).4 These appeared, along with smaller table-top sculpture and projected digital video works, at the erstwhile Momenta Art in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.5 A glass assemblage, Kool-Aid (2011), consists of clear breast-like globules filled with salt and glowing with cool, pink-blue lights emphasizing the sculpture’s berries-like impression.6 In a later hanging glass composition, Invisible Manish (2015), salt and coal fill the clear vessels.7 Smaller groupings of these glass forms may peek out from a dome of dried tobacco leaves comprising Cupboard II (2015), shown in Crop Rotation at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville in 2015.8 You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been, an installation in 2012 at The Kitchen, West 19th Street in Chelsea, seemed a culminating moment for Leigh’s pendant forms. Three “chandeliers” appeared. In addition to the glasswork Kool-Aid, there were two ceramic installations – Queen Bee (2008-2012) and You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2012), namesake for the exhibition.9 Leigh described the relationship between these works and their formal development: “Most of the large objects in the two ceramic chandeliers are based on the form of a watermelon… I started with the bullet-shaped forms I used in Queen Bee. Then I flipped them over and started making enlarged cowrie shells...”10 Those “bullet-shaped forms” appear to have originated with Untitled (2001).

Whereas Untitled’s fleshy forms suggest plenty and nourishment, like breasts or the melons that shaped them, Queen Bee and its later iteration – Trophallaxis (2008-2017)– are sinister mutations.11 The latter’s cool graphite surfaces, spiky metallic nipples, and prickly antennae suggest the destructive potential of bullets and torpedoes. Yet both variations led Leigh to the swelling cowrie shells that have become a distinctive sculptural element in the artist’s oeuvre. The freckly mottled glazing of the cowrie shell forms of You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been and related works like Untitled (2017), in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art, glisten with life.12

Having borne related ceramic and glass hanging sculptures, then cowrie-shaped forms, and having been created many years before Leigh’s freestanding sculptures took on their monumental scale, Untitled (2001) -- with its celebration of pure clay -- is no less generative or architectural. True to the artist’s insistence on recognition of “black femme subjectivity”13 and fraught histories of the contributions and uses of black women’s bodies in global history, Untitled (2001) retains a critical stance. Requiring the viewer to look up, raising one’s eyes and tilting the head back on approach toward pendant breasts, the installation suggests a maternity composition in which the viewer, implicitly, is the suckling child.

Nichole N. Bridges