MARY O'MALLEY
BIO
Mary O’Malley is an American-born ceramic artist based in Georgia. She holds an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in London and a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. O’Malley first gained national attention with her Bottom Feeder series (2011–2013), exhibited with the American Craft Council, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, and in a solo exhibition at The Clay Studio.
Her work has since been shown internationally at institutions including the British Ceramics Biennial, Saatchi Gallery, Christie’s, Chun Art Museum (Shanghai), and Parcours Céramique Carougeois (Geneva). She co-founded Collective Matter, a London-based artist collective that held a six-month Tate Exchange residency at Tate Modern.
O’Malley has participated in residencies in China, Italy, and the United States, with forthcoming projects at Artlink at Fort Dunree in Donegal, Ireland (2025–2026). Her work is represented by Taste Contemporary (Geneva) and held in public and private collections worldwide, including the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and 21C Museum Hotel. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Mercer University.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I am a ceramic artist and sculptor currently based in Macon, Georgia, in the Southeastern United States. My work explores themes of ornamentation, history, and cultural identity, often using ceramic materials and mixed media to investigate the intersections between the natural world and human-made systems. I am Connaught-Irish-American and was raised outside of New York City. My work engages with the complexities of double decolonization, reckoning with both the imperial legacies of colonizers such as the British Empire and the ideological colonization of the Catholic Church and sectarian societies. I consider how these structures have shaped Irish identity historically and continue to influence diasporic experience, power, victim-identities, and cultural memory today.
I approach ceramics as both a sculptural and anthropological medium. Through the re-appropriation of historic decorative objects, I examine how cultural knowledge is preserved, distorted, and revived across time and place. Recent bodies of work have drawn from Irish and Chinese mythologies, the decorative arts, global trade, traditional craft practices, and ecological narratives. By weaving together symbols from disparate geographies, I create layered ceramic works and installations that function as allegories, reflecting the entanglement of personal heritage, global material histories, and contemporary cultural politics.
