Working primarily with various methods of industrial casting, Nicolas Deshayes’s sculptures tend to be hard, made from materials such as plastic, ceramic, vitreous enamel, aluminium or cast iron. Formally, however, his works reference soft, moving and malleable things; things that are alive and functioning. Recent sculptures have been made from glazed earthenware, fabricated using a slip-casting process in Veneto, Italy. Reminiscent of traditional domestic washbasins in their forms and colouring, they are also variably abstract and painterly, each with their own composition. Like vessels turned inside out, or bulging body parts, Deshayes’s ceramic sculptures play with positive and negative space.