William Cobbing – Inner Horizon: Wild Clay Adventures in Utah

William Cobbing talks about the 2025 Inner Horizon video he made in Utah, for his solo exhibition at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Travelling across Utah state, from the Great Salt Lake in the north to Green River in the south, he made a series of site-specific sculptural interventions and performances with clay in the landscape. The raw materiality of the clay connected his sculptural prosthetics and the earthy environments, allowing for an unexpected dialogue to unfold that was caught on video. He will present some of these clay prosthetics to interact with at Ceramic Art London, as well as the videos from the Inner Horizon exhibition.

Starting from a sculptural sensibility, William Cobbing’s art practice encompasses a diverse range of media, including video, photography and installation. Performative encounters are devised with material, such as clay, in which the protagonists are engaged in a repetitive and absurd cycle of manipulating formless surfaces. The works allude to concepts of entropy, underlining the extent to which earthly material is irreversibly dispersed, giving rise to a definitive blurring of the boundaries between the body and landscape, whilst putting the possibility of conclusion on hold. William studied sculpture at Central St Martins, De Ateliers, an artists’ institute in Amsterdam and a PhD at Middlesex University.