Mudbelly ceramics studio began as a research outlet for artist Phoebe Collings-James’ pottery practice, and has since grown to encompass an online shop and a roaming teaching facility offering free ceramics courses for black people in London, taught by black ceramicists. Responding to a personal and collective desire to learn alongside people of African and Afro-Caribbean descent. A proportion of sales from all Mudbelly pots goes towards supporting the Mudbelly Teaches project, this goes alongside public and private fundraising that has included support from Gucci and Arts Council England.

Phoebe Collings-James, (b. 1987) is a Jamaican British sculptor working across mediums to realize work that explores major universal themes: violence, sexuality, desire and fear. Having studied fine art in London, their first experience with ceramics was in 2014 during the Nuove artist residency in Italy. Immediately struck by the intensely transformative quality of ceramics and the haptic communication it encourages, they continued to study wheel thrown and hand built techniques while living in Brooklyn, USA, enveloping ceramic forms into performance work, installations and domestic objects. In 2019 Collings-James moved home to east London, UK, to continue their ceramics journey in the neighbourhood they grew up in. In autumn 2021, as the Freelands Ceramic Fellow they exhibited their first institutional solo show of ceramic works at Camden Arts Centre, London. Over the summer of 2022 they were in residence at the historic Archie Bray centre in Montana, where a whole new scope of ceramic practice was opened up.