Gabriella Rhodes: Earth-Based Sculptures and Artistic Research

Gabriella Rhodes is an artist based on the Llyn Peninsula, North Wales. Her practice is place-based, centred on artistic research into ecology, geology, and vernacular knowledge systems. Since relocating from Manchester to Wales in 2020, she has shifted from traditional ceramics towards a regenerative, bio-regional practice working directly with locally gathered earths. She primarily works with clom—a traditional mixture of clay-rich soil and straw found in the region’s vernacular architecture—reinterpreting earth-building techniques within a contemporary sculptural context. Materials are gathered responsibly following landslips or gifted as waste by local industries. Using hand-built, unfired processes, her works retain the textures, colour variations, and material character of site-specific earths. The sculptures are unfired but naturally cured, making them durable enough to last for centuries, yet able to be broken down, remade, or returned to the land as part of an ongoing geological cycle. Her forms emerge from walking and fieldwork in the local landscape, translating encounters with tidal rhythms, weather systems, and undulating hillsides into abstract sculptural shapes. Rhodes holds a BA in Three-Dimensional Design from Manchester School of Art and is currently completing an MA in Regenerative Design at Central Saint Martins. Her work has been exhibited at London Craft Week and supported by the Arts Council of Wales, as well as through international residencies. Her practice proposes a reimagining of earthy matter not as a passive resource, but as an active, temporal collaborator within interdependent living systems.