In her first major museum solo exhibition, the London-based artist Irina Razumovskaya embodies the silence around loss in clay, and leaves every crack showing. The exhibition brings together sculpture and installation in terracotta, porcelain and steel.

KORE is about loss and the silence around it. The title is the Greek word for maiden and daughter, and another name for Persephone. In the myth Persephone returns to the underworld every year, and every year her mother mourns again, so grief is a cycle rather than an ending. Razumovskaya sees loss in the same way, whether it is the loss of security, of a homeland, or a personal loss. For her the starting point was the stillbirth of her child, and the uncomfortable silence that still surrounds such losses. Driven by an urgent need to open the door to this taboo territory, she treats loss not as a single event but as a slow process, and makes that process her material. Instead of offering answers, she gently takes the viewer along and offers a language to navigate these emotions and narratives.

KORE brings together several bodies of work made mostly in 2026, each of which takes up a form that clay has carried for thousands of years, whether the inscribed tablet, a figure or the storage jar. Razumovskaya builds them, allows them to break in the making, and then shows what holds the pieces together, like scar tissue or stitches, whether it is scaffolding, tile grout or terracotta clay.

The title is the Greek word for maiden and daughter; it is another name for Persephone, the daughter carried off to the underworld while her mother searched for her. “Loss is usually told as an event,” Razumovskaya says. “I wanted to look at it as a process, with subtlety and even beauty.”

Along one wall, Lacunae sets out terracotta tablets in the manner of a lapidarium, where an archaeological museum displays its excavated inscriptions. Each carries, in Roman capitals, an order addressed to women, distilled from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a manual on running a household written in the fourth century BC. Razumovskaya made the tablets to break, and every fissure is filled with a pale flesh-pink glaze. A lacuna is a missing passage in a text and also a small hollow in living tissue. Behind the work is Sappho, whose poems survive as scraps. “Sappho reaches us shattered,” Razumovskaya says, “and the gaps now belong to the poem.”

Three porcelain figures, Graeae, look out over the room from tall pedestals faced with white tiles. Razumovskaya makes them in reverse, hollowing each volume out of a bed of sand and filling it with porcelain, then fires them with a surface designed to craze and shed. Each stands in pieces, held together and apart by galvanised builders’ scaffolding. In myth the Graeae are three sisters who share one eye and one tooth. For Razumovskaya the eye is the judgment women are made to pass on one another’s fertility and worth. “My figures still preside,” she says. “That is the point.”

Five vessels, Amphorae, each 85 centimetres high, stand in a row on a long, low tiled table. They take up the old figure of the woman as a container, valued for what she carries, and keep it empty. The series grew from the stillbirth of Razumovskaya’s child. Each of the five records a different stage of motherhood and grief, including the losses that fall within stages usually counted as happy. Their glazes craze and close over again, and unlike the figures they stand unsupported.

The scaffolding returns in Disciplined. Porcelain with a crackled, skin-like surface hangs from it like a hide or a sling, pierced by butcher’s hooks and weighted with rusted chains. The work draws on research into the “punitive gynaecology” of the Soviet Union, where medicine served the state’s demographic aims and pain was used as correction. The hook does two things at once, supporting the porcelain and piercing it. “In KORE I treat the silence as something that was built, and I ask who built it, who maintains it, and what it has cost,” Razumovskaya says.

The museum’s director, Dr Nele van Wieringen, who curated the exhibition, reads it more widely. In her exhibition text she writes of a lost homeland and of a language no one speaks any more, and she likens Razumovskaya’s borrowing of ancient words to the practice of Soviet writers of the 1930s who, denied a voice of their own, translated the classics and hid their criticism between the lines. “Here the missing words become the load-bearing element,” she writes.

Irina Razumovskaya (b. 1990, Leningrad) is a sculptor working in clay. She lives in London and teaches at the Royal College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions at Officine Saffi in Milan and Rabih Hage at Cromwell Place in London, and her work has been shown at Nilufar Gallery, Sotheby’s Stockholm and PAD Paris. She was a finalist for the LOEWE Craft Prize, and in 2024 won the 1st Prize at the 15th Westerwald Prize. Her work is in collections including Chatsworth House, the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art.

Irina Razumovskaya: KORE, 25 September 2026 to 10 January 2027. Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Lindenstrasse 13, 56203 Hoehr-Grenzhausen, Germany. Curated by Dr Nele van Wieringen. 26 works in terracotta, stoneware, porcelain, glaze and steel. Photos: Kai Werner Schmidt and Tania Tolvers, courtesy of the artist and the museum.