Family Secrets, 2025 - 2026. Solo intervention, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, East Sussex.
Family Secrets is a special intervention that uses sculpture and colour to activate the ceramics collection at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery.
Kim L Pace’s strange, surreal and symbolic figures are placed in dialogue with the museum’s collection, animating ceramics from function into fiction. Pace’s new 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 was supported by a bursary from a-n.
Vessel For Family Secrets, 2025, glazed ceramic. This sculpture relates to ritualistic storage vessels from across many cultures, like Etruscan Cistae which feature mythological scenes in low relief.
Tureen (For Family Shame), 2025. Glazed ceramic. A tureen is a large serving dish for holding soup. Here, Pace alters associations of sustenance by re-imagining it as a container for the deeply corrosive emotion of shame.
Family Ties, 2022-23. All glazed ceramic. The works in this display come from a series where Pace is considering the impact of family histories–especially matrilineal ancestors–on how we experience the world and how our forebears help shape our lives and identities in the present.
Tureen (For Family Shame), 2025. Glazed ceramic.
Detail: Family Ties, 2022-23. All glazed ceramic.
Pace’s Reclining Figures series (2024-25) revisits one of the oldest and most enduring motifs in sculpture. In Pace’s series, her reclining figures suggest vulnerability–appearing to have slipped over or perhaps are struggling to get up.
Bowl for Shame Soup 1, 2025. Glazed ceramic. From the Soup Service series, including a Tureen & 4 bowls. Pace’s soup service 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. Face mugs or tankards are found in many cultures ranging from ancient civilisations to European and Folk Traditions.
Vessel For Family Secrets, 2025, glazed ceramic.
Vessel (For the Ancestors), 2023. Glazed ceramic Pace’s Vessel is a reimagined amphora, intended to provoke thoughts about those who came before us. Appearing to emerge from inside of the vessel, each strange face connects with an imagined ancestor.