Artist: Deryn Cowdy
2026
Black and white ceramic
6 x 12 x 12 in
Dirt Sex explores the ancient entanglement of eroticism, fertility and death. Beneath us is a dark, crowded world where innumerable organisms press against each other, penetrate, consume, exchange, reproduce, and die. Nothing remains itself for long. Dead matter, threaded by fungi, decomposes, is consumed, transforms, creates.
Dirt Sex stems from my desire to make this hidden world physical. White porcelain flowers open, pale and seductive, while black clay forms crowd together beneath them. One world is light, the other dark, visceral and largely unseen, but each hungry for the other.
Soil is both bed and grave. For millennia it has carried associations with burial, fertility, the underworld, ritual and magic. Ancient cultures understood sexuality and the fertility of the earth as part of the same mysterious force. Contemporary soil ecology reveals what was once understood as magic to be inseparable from biology: countless intimate acts of exchange, decomposition and regeneration continually making life.
Dirt Sex is my homage to that relentless appetite—the erotic force running through living matter, where sex and death are accomplices, and everything that dies becomes available to life again.
Artist: Deryn Cowdy
2026
Black and white ceramic
6 x 12 x 12 in
Dirt Sex explores the ancient entanglement of eroticism, fertility and death. Beneath us is a dark, crowded world where innumerable organisms press against each other, penetrate, consume, exchange, reproduce, and die. Nothing remains itself for long. Dead matter, threaded by fungi, decomposes, is consumed, transforms, creates.
Dirt Sex stems from my desire to make this hidden world physical. White porcelain flowers open, pale and seductive, while black clay forms crowd together beneath them. One world is light, the other dark, visceral and largely unseen, but each hungry for the other.
Soil is both bed and grave. For millennia it has carried associations with burial, fertility, the underworld, ritual and magic. Ancient cultures understood sexuality and the fertility of the earth as part of the same mysterious force. Contemporary soil ecology reveals what was once understood as magic to be inseparable from biology: countless intimate acts of exchange, decomposition and regeneration continually making life.
Dirt Sex is my homage to that relentless appetite—the erotic force running through living matter, where sex and death are accomplices, and everything that dies becomes available to life again.
