A series of twelve fired cubes printed with protest texts using self-made lithopigments. The work responds to ongoing restrictions on bodily autonomy, especially for women. Each cube holds messages burned into clay—some clear, others obscured by glaze or fire. Together, they mark the permanence of struggle, and the need to keep naming what cannot be erased.

Title: Empowerment in Clay: #MyBodyMyChoice Protest Art Cubes

Medium: Stoneware with oxides, engobes, and glazes; lithoprint with self-made pigment ink

Dimensions: 15 × 15 × 17 cm (each)

Artist: Carina Claassens, November 2022

 

This series of twelve stoneware cubes was created as a direct response to the repeated policing of women’s bodies—by law, religion, and social custom. Each piece carries fragments of language: phrases drawn from protest signs, private conversations, and the artist’s own reflections. These words are printed into the surface using lithoprint techniques and pigment inks mixed by hand. Once fired, the text becomes part of the ceramic body—no longer removable, no longer negotiable.

The cube form—compact, unyielding—stands in contrast to the vulnerability of its subject. Each face holds tension: beauty against brutality, silence against refusal. Some messages are clear, others obscured by glaze runs, oxidation, or firing scars. This distortion is intentional. Not all voices are heard the same way. Not all pain is easily read.

The artist approaches this work not from abstraction, but from lived experience: as a woman, a mother, and someone shaped by the silences of a culture where autonomy was rarely named, let alone supported.

Empowerment in Clay is not an invitation to be inspired. It’s an act of holding space—for resistance, grief, rage, and clarity. The work asks: what does it mean to make something solid when the ground beneath you keeps shifting?