Family Secrets, 2025 - 2026. Solo intervention, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, East Sussex.
Family Secrets is a special intervention where sculpture and colour activate the ceramics collection at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery.
Placed in dialogue with the museum’s collection, Pace’s strange, surreal and symbolic figures animate ceramics from function into fiction. The story-vessels and ceramic sculptures reflect her fascination with the varying ways in which we experience the world, and how the lives of those before us shape who we are today. Her sculptural objects - 17 in total - blur artifact and emotion, suggesting each becomes a container, where viewers are encouraged to imagine what family secrets, forgotten narratives, and intimate truths might be held within these works. Drawing upon historical sculptural and ceramic forms and the silent inheritance of family history, Pace’s sculptures also remind us that the adjacent museum objects, along with their secrets and provenances, are also passed down and passed on. Work development supported by a bursary from a-n.
Vessel For Family Secrets, 2025, glazed ceramic. Relates to ritualistic storage vessels, like Etruscan Cistae which feature mythological scenes in low relief.
Tureen (For Family Shame), 2025. Glazed ceramic. Pace alters associations of a tureen by re-imagining it as a container for the deeply corrosive emotion of shame.
Family Ties, 2022-23. All glazed ceramic. The series considers the impact of family histories–especially matrilineal ancestors–on how we experience the world and how our forebears help shape our lives and identities.
Tureen (For Family Shame), 2025. Glazed ceramic.
Detail: Family Ties, 2022-23. All glazed ceramic.
Pace’s Reclining Figures series (2024-25). Revisiting one of the oldest and most enduring motifs in sculpture, Pace’s reclining figures suggest vulnerability: perhaps they've slipped over or are struggling to get up.
Bowl for Shame Soup 1, 2025. Glazed ceramic. The Soup Service includes the Tureen & 4 bowls. Pace’s suggests something other than the satisfying nourishment we expect from a soup: her bowls form an integral part of an imaginary family meal where ‘Shame Soup’ is on offer.
Mood Vessels, 2022. All glazed ceramic. Pace’s Mood Vessel series (2022) suggest ancestral presences: the faces connect the vessels to a person or spirit and convey variations in emotional states.
Vessel For Family Secrets, 2025, glazed ceramic.
Vessel (For the Ancestors), 2023. Glazed ceramic A reimagined amphora, intended to provoke thoughts about those who came before us. Each emerging face connects with an imagined ancestor.