Meet artists Ben Orkin, showing RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2026

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:01]I think there's different ways of seeing.

[00:00:04]I've realised you can see through touch.

[00:00:08]And kind of like a protrusion creates darkness.

[00:00:11]And you can feel that darkness by touching the sculpture too.

[00:00:17]It's not necessarily just about what you see with your eyes, but it can be about feeling.

[00:00:35]I've been working with clay for as long as I can remember.

[00:00:40]My mother is a ceramicist too, and she introduced me to the material.

[00:00:46]I think I chose clay as a means of expressing myself because it is so familiar to me.

[00:00:55]If you look at clay under a microscope, it's comprised of these tiny particles that are in the shape of plates, and depending how they're arranged, they can hold a memory within the clay body.

[00:01:10]So it's the idea of folding the clay over itself until you create the spiral like structure on the inside.

[00:01:19]And when people talk about clay having memory, that's what they're referring to.

[00:01:23]It's how these particles are arranged.

[00:01:31]And the body in a very similar way, also holds memory.

[00:01:35]I also am a body worker, and I practice a technique called body stress release.

[00:01:42]And there again I see this thing of the body holding memory.

[00:01:50]So when I'm working with clay I think very intentionally about what is the relationship between the clay's memory?

[00:01:58]How can I imbue a memory into the clay, and what can I make it do?

[00:02:02]And how can that speak to kind of a bodily experience or some kind of relationship?

[00:02:08]So that's where my work departs from.

[00:02:11]It's all about relationships.

[00:02:23]For the RMB Latitudes Art Fair I’m making some works that derive from an earlier body of work that I was working on in maybe 2020, and I created this piece that was named after a safe sex manual that was written in the 80s called How to Have Sex in an Epidemic : One Approach.

[00:02:47]And I kind of explored the idea of this community and a virus spreading through a community through touch.

[00:02:56]So I created these works where each piece kind of interlocks into the next piece, but they aren't necessarily touching, and there's a very clear barrier between each of the pieces.

[00:03:07]And I've been exploring that in a smaller way of kind of looking at how do these people connect and fit with each other, or how are they separated from each other, and kind of creating these stories about relationships.