Ben Orkin builds clay forms that fit together, like words that click into a sentence, making meaning in collaboration. This compiling of separate elements, like a drawing together of atoms, is essential to Orkin’s practice. The artist finds sense in the back and forth between forms, the intimacy of meaning-making. His clay bodies are interlocutors, lovers, or letters of an alphabet. His work bears witness to the sacred synapses between the earth and the hand, the body and the mind, the noun and the verb. The fruit of these connections is found in the tension between two things, vibrating at the centre. Orkin speaks into the absences of the 1980s peak of the global AIDS crisis and its impact on gay and bisexual men.

Orkin’s engagement with the inextinguishable power of language remembers the maxim Silence = Death. Orkin’s visual language binds together the gap between words, the convergence and divergence of lovers. It mends the holes in a threadbare language; it insists on oblique memorials and monuments to the future of intimacy. In many ways, Orkin’s practice has been his learning to express himself. The earlier works stand as utterances of what he did not yet know he wanted to say, voluminous letters of a gestating alphabet. The artist’s most recent clayworks showcase a generous lexicon that is increasingly developed and complex. Gently, in this fragmentary language, in this erotic absence and tantalising presence, in the gaps, the bodies of clay interact with each other, yearn for each other – they exist in dialogue, either opposing, completing, or simply touching one another. There is a tenderness held close to them that reveals intimacies about their maker: the sensual curves of a body that is recognisably male, that is both dressed in drag and unclad. How to have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach (2021) marks a high point in Orkin’s communication through clay: thirty-one separate pieces that were conceived in relation to one another. This body of work expresses so much of a community’s thoughts on sex and intimacy – our desires to touch, taunt, complete and reject each other.