The Liberty Vessel no.162
Clink Street Ceramics Window Gallery, Clink Street, Bankside, London SE1 9FE
3 November 2025 - 31 January 2026
A monumental ceramic sculpture reflecting the Thames’s layered history of trade, freedom, and transformation
Standing over two metres tall in the Clink Street Ceramics window gallery, a narrow glass recess along historic Clink Street, “The Liberty Vessel,” a new ceramic installation by artist Julia Ellen Lancaster, offers a powerful meditation on London’s riverine past and its resonance in the present.
Drawing inspiration from the long history of trade along the Thames, particularly during the 19th century when the stretch near London Bridge thrummed with global exchange, the work revisits a time when ships laden with tea, spices, coal, sugar, ivory, and raw materials docked nearby. This same area once housed the notorious Clink Prison, giving its name to the Liberty of the Clink, a district under the Bishop of Winchester’s jurisdiction, where trade and taxation coexisted with exploitation and confinement.
“The Liberty Vessel” references both ship and container, questioning freedom as something transported, negotiated, or traded. Composed of distinct, hand-built ceramic sections, each with unique textures, glazes, and embedded fragments, the sculpture mirrors the diversity of goods and human experiences that once flowed through this riverside artery. Its layered form evokes the industrial vitality and environmental strain of a city that prospered through exchange while polluting its own lifeline.
The work’s surfaces, glazed in iridescent greens and metallic tones, recall the polluted waters of the 19th-century Thames, shifting, reflective, and contaminated. Cracked and pitted textures speak to the erosion of both material and moral fabric wrought by industry and empire. Embedded within are fragments of coloured glass collected from the Thames foreshore: remnants of bottles from Victorian docks, now washed smooth by time and tide. These inclusions turn the sculpture into a living archive, an object that both carries and reveals the city’s material memory.
Installed just a short walk from London Bridge, “The Liberty Vessel” stands as a contemporary beacon in the flow of Southwark’s ongoing renewal. As the Thames once carried goods and people from around the world, so today the area remains a site of constant movement, cultural, social, and environmental. Lancaster’s work invites reflection on what “liberty” means amid global exchange, ecological fragility, and the city’s evolving identity.
The Clink Street Ceramics window ‘gallery’ in Clink Street is one of London’s only public art displays dedicated to the exhibition of ceramics. The long vertical window aims to surprise and charm the thousands of people who each week live, work and visit Bankside on the South Bank of London’s River Thames.
“The Thames has always been a vessel of both connection and contradiction, a river of wealth and waste, freedom and control. This work acknowledges that legacy while asking how we navigate our freedoms now.” Julia Ellen Lancaster