In a certain kind of proper Southern white family, a girl grows up, gets married, and inherits her grandmother’s fine China, which she herself received as a wedding gift decades earlier. If you were such a girl, and you received such a gift, you might look forward to opening the box that contained the China, which you would proudly arrange in a credenza in your dining room. If you were to open the box, and it were to contain China that had gone through the studio of Sharon Norwood, a Savannah-based artist, you might scream, because the China would be covered in hair. Thick, curly, glorious strands of Black hair that Norwood traced by hand using her own hair as a model, printed on decals, and fired onto the China in a kiln.

“I think a lot about Black bodies being visibly invisible,” Norwood said in a recent interview in her Baldwin Park studio with Sulfur Studios. “Present in certain spaces, and absent in others.”

What she means is that just a few short decades ago, the woman who cooked food and served it on the China – and afterwards, carefully washed it by hand – would have been Black, especially in Savannah, Georgia, where Norwood, a Black woman, is based. And just a mere century earlier, that woman would have been enslaved to the family that owned not only the beautiful dishware, but also, the woman’s actual body.

“How do I make sense of my body and my position in the world and in space knowing this information?” Norwood asks. “Especially when some of these objects, including the fine china, are things that I’m naturally attracted to?”

Norwood, who has lived in Savannah since 2018, initially went to graduate school to become a painter. Then, she discovered ceramics, and realized the material was a better vehicle for her creativity. “Folks would be like, ‘Oh, those are really cool,’” Norwood laughed, waving a porcelain finger with a sharp red nail in the air. “My ceramics are memorable.”

The city of Savannah provides additional material inspiration. For example, when Norwood first moved here, she discovered that she had a pile of Savannah gray bricks in her backyard. Made by enslaved people at the Hermitage Plantation near the Savannah River in the antebellum period, the bricks were used to build many of the stately homes in the downtown area, as well as around the South. Due to fires, war and the end of production due to the end of slavery, Savannah gray bricks have become exceedingly rare — and valuable. “For me, they’re so interesting, because here is this material that’s still very present in the world, and that’s also a complete index of history,” she says. “They feed into this notion that Black bodies are visibly invisible, that we’re hidden in plain sight.”

In a sculptural installation entitled Serving Up Those Savannah Grays (2020), Norwood placed six of the bricks on a silver platter. In her studio, Norwood has them built into pyramids and topped with ceramic statutes of adorable Black boys. Originally intended to be shown in the homes of Black families — “Folks want to have things in their spaces that represent themselves,” Norwood says — the statues are made from molds Norwood purchased from a man who was selling a kiln. Norwood says she is drawn to the kitschy objects because they make her question when a cute Black boy becomes a menacing Black man in the American imagination. Walking around her studio, they seemed to follow us, waiting for their moment to coalesce into meaning.

“Even when we think we’re being neutral in our learning, there’s stuff in our landscape we’re not even aware of,” she says. In the process of constantly re-combining objects – for example, black hair with fine China, and Black boys with Savannah gray bricks – she’s jolting our brains into waking up, and actually looking.

Holding up a piece of fine linen she embroidered with the word “Fuck” in shiny pink thread — “I made it when I was like really stressed the fuck out with Trump,” she says — Norwood muses that her work is the way that she processes the world. She’s a Black woman who is both visible and invisible. She’s a recently married housewife who loves pretty things but feels alienated by domestic goddesses and the trappings of femininity.

“My work embodies who I am as a person,” she says. “Yeah, I feel like I’m funny. Yeah, I’m trying to have this unique voice that speaks to what I see and know. And hopefully, fingers crossed, it’s authentic enough that it resonates with a wider audience.”

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