To celebrate 25 Years of Gay Pride in Hull 2026, at a time when identity, memory, and cultural history remain fiercely contested, Studio Eleven Gallery presents Provocative Pots — a bold new exhibition of ceramic works by Liverpool-based artists Chris Turrell and Simon Dredge. Through clay, porcelain, glaze, image, and narrative, the exhibition confronts the enduring overlap of queerness, visibility, politics, and survival.
Far from decorative objects, these works insist on ceramics as a radical storytelling medium — one capable of carrying histories often omitted from public memory. Both artists draw deeply from personal and collective LGBT experience, asking what it means to preserve identity in fragile times, and how beauty itself can become an act of resistance.
For Chris Turrell, the exhibition is rooted in formative encounters with the uncompromising work of Derek Jarman and ceramic artist Angus Suttie. Growing up as a gay teenager in 1980s Britain, Turrell found few reflections of himself in mainstream culture until the emergence of independent film and politically engaged art.
“Influential figures such as Derek Jarman and Angus Suttie played a crucial role in my artistic and personal development,” says Turrell. “Their unflinching, political, and beautiful works — created at a time when being gay was fraught with societal and political challenges — continue to inform my practice today.”
Using stoneware clays layered with oxides, slips, underglazes, watercolour, and wax, Turrell creates intensely tactile surfaces scarred, sanded, distressed, and rebuilt. His vessels become emotional landscapes where vulnerability and defiance coexist.
Simon Dredge approaches ceramics as an archaeological act — excavating hidden histories embedded within queer culture. Working primarily in porcelain, Dredge incorporates photographic imagery, acrylic paint, ceramic glaze, and watercolour into layered surfaces that evoke both intimacy and erasure. His work is particularly inspired by Polari, the coded underground language historically used within Britain’s gay community as protection against persecution and criminalisation.
“History is a fabric woven with stories that should never be forgotten,” says Dredge.
The shadow and influence of Derek Jarman permeates the provocation — not simply as homage, but as a reminder of art’s capacity to confront political hostility with honesty and beauty. In an era marked by renewed debates around identity, censorship, and belonging,
Provocative Pots asks urgent questions:
What stories survive?
Who gets remembered?
And what happens when marginalised voices refuse silence?
Together, Turrell and Dredge transform ceramics into vessels of memory, protest, and tenderness — proving that clay can hold not only form, but history itself.
Studio Eleven Gallery
12 Humber Street, Hull, HU1 1TG
Gallery opening times: Wednesday – Saturday, 10:30am – 4pm