Spanish-Equatoguinean ceramicist Bisila Noha has been named the recipient of the Tacchini Prize, an award from the Italian furniture brand in partnership with Fondazione Officine Saffi, a non-profit dedicated to contemporary ceramics. The newly established prize celebrates the intersection of contemporary artistic research and design culture, focusing on materials as a field of research and expression.
With the prize comes an exhibition dedicated to Noha at Casa Tacchini, the brand’s apartment-turned-showroom in Milan. The show, ‘A Tactile Story’ (on until 13 November 2026), presents Noha’s sculptural, expressive ceramics among a selection of Tacchini furniture. Vessels that appear cracked and disintegrating hang from a rope attached to the ceiling; two-legged sculptures stand in an illuminated corner; a giant pot with gradated colours sits in the window.
Bisila Noha and the culture of ceramics
Born in Spain in 1988 and based in London, Noha’s star has been rising since she turned away from a career in advertising towards exploring pottery in 2016. ‘I just fell in love with it,’ she tells Wallpaper*. Since then, she has enjoyed multiple international residencies and solo exhibitions, and her work has been acquired by the V&A Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and several other cultural institutions.
She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation in London, and has work on show at the Venice Biennale and Princeton University Art Museum. In March 2026, she staged a solo show with Thrown Contemporary at OmVed Gardens in London, ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’.
Noha’s approach to ceramics is underpinned by deep historical and cultural research, which she has pursued at residencies in Nigeria and Senegal, in particular. ‘I thought, if I want to be fluent in clay, I need to go to the places where people have been doing this for generation after generation,’ she says, adding that she is ‘really interested’ in the history of women’s labour in relation to pottery. For Noha, the craft of ceramics is about much more than simply making beautiful objects, and is deeply connected to notions of community and feminism.
Past projects include ‘Baney Clay’, in which Noha used clay sourced from her father’s village in Equatorial Guinea, mixing it with other ingredients such as porcelain to make vessels that explored her dual identity as Spanish and Equatoguinean. ‘I wanted to develop this body of work looking at my own heritage’, she explains. The pots take on different appearances, hues and textures depending on the clay mixes chosen for each work.
‘Searching for Kouame Kakahá’ involved tracking down a potter in Ivory Coast whose work from the 1960s had inspired Noha’s own practice, as a way to counter the traditional erasure and devaluing of female potters. The vessels and sculptures Noha made in the process feature gestural scratches, openings and holes; ‘It’s the idea of unearthing myself,’ says Noha.
The exhibition ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’ brought together four years of work, reflecting on West African culture, ritual practices and communal making. As well as clay vessels, some of which seemed to break open and unfurl, there were stools and bronze sculptures.
‘I’ve always loved stools,’ Noha says. Those she made are small and very low to the ground, reflective of the type Noha has seen used by many women in kitchens and pottery studios, to stay close to work on the floor. Making the stools combined throwing, sculpting, hand building, and joinery; while Noha approached it through a sculptural lens, she ensured the stools were also functional. Noha, who uses some of the stools she made in her own home, is considering the possibility of getting them manufactured one day.
Her exploration of bronze began in 2022, at a residency in Benin City, where Noha discovered the importance of wax, and clay, in enabling bronze sculptures. The work she made there reflected on Benin’s rich history of lost-wax bronze casting, in which wax models encased in moulds melt away to be replaced by molten metal. Noha saw the method as a metaphor for the hidden labour of women, particularly women of colour, in society. Her new project, ‘The Lost Bronze’ – which is due to be exhibited at the 1-54 art fair in London this October – expands upon this work, exhibiting a series of vessels in unfired clay and wax.
Noha’s Sarabande residency will conclude in November, as will her Casa Tacchini show, prompting a new chapter. She plans to move to a new studio in Dalston, east London, and has an upcoming project with the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid. What drives her forward, she says, is the exploration of history, and place, through the act of making.
Casa Tacchini hosts 'A Tactile Story by Bisila Noha', on view until 13 November 2026
Casa Tacchini
Largo Treves 5,
20121 Milan