Supersized jug-pot heads, tessellated windscreens and an ominous ceiling fan made out of cutlery. This is the work of Emma Hart, a sometime photographer turned sculptor whose striking, thought-provoking and frequently witty ceramics won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2016. Next week, she has her first Scottish show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, displaying her prize work and new work made especially for the Fruitmarket space.

Ceramics became the expressive medium of choice for Hart a number of years into her post-art school practice. It marked, then, a dramatic change in her focus, after a BA degree in Photography and an early career focus on film. “She told me she wanted to make something which would exist as a “thing” in the real world that people could relate to,” says Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Curator and on the jury of the Max Mara Prize the year that Hart won, “not just as an object in an art gallery.” It is one of the interesting things about her work, this “direct and democratic relationship between a person and a thing,” as Bradley puts it. And she also, it turns out, just loved the process of moulding clay.

“I knew of her work previously, but it was during the process of judging the Max Mara prize that I saw it close up. The way she talked about her work was fiercely intelligent and exciting. I thought, I don’t care if she wins the prize or not, I want to do a show with her!”

Hart, born in London in 1974, graduated from Croydon College of Art (BA, 2000), before undertaking an MA at Slade and a PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University. She now lectures BA Fine Art at Central St. Martins, with recent major awards including the Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for visual art in 2013.

Her Max Mara Prize win enabled her to spend a year in Italy, six months of which was spent in a factory in Faenza – home of Majolica ceramics - honing her ceramics skills, with another few months spent in Milan studying the work of a radical psychologist. Talks with Bradley soon turned more concretely to showing the results of her prize stint. “The problem for artists is very often they will win a major prize and then find that that is that, they’ve had their boost, they are expected to be there, to have made it. Very often they find themselves having made this great new work but with nowhere to put it. I thought it would be interesting to give Emma the space to put that new work.” Fruitmarket has also commissioned a new catalogue of the work, including, rather fabulously, a new short story by Ali Smith, which was inspired by visits to Hart's studio during the making of BANGER.

Mamma Mia! is a submersive installation, electrical flexes strung about, large ceramic works hung heavily in the space. It is a work of cast light and moving parts, centred around the huge upturned “jug” heads – a nod to her Majolica training –which hang in the space, occasionally just above whirling china cutlery fans – very morbid - the light from inside the head (lamps) cast onto the floor like speech bubbles. Crane your own head into one of Hart’s and you would find a variety of repeated motifs, riffing on notions of domesticity. For the Fruitmarket show the heads will be hung in a new configuration, lower than in previous installations, which Bradley, on the phone and fresh from installing the works in the gallery, tells me really changes the balance, making the gallery viewers’ experience of the sculptures’ monochrome exterior and the colour-pop interior patterns more equal.

That, then, feeds into the new work which Hart has created for the upper galleries. Banger is a series of works that explore a familiar trope in daily life – being in a car. “She has made these extraordinary sculptures of car windscreens,” says Bradley. The screens are created from handmade tiles which tessellate exactly but contain a completely different – but related - image on one side to the other. “On one side a form might be a parking ticket, but on the other it’s a leaf that’s fallen off a tree. In another, the windscreen has smashed, on the other side the patterns form a map. When you move from one side to another, you find yourself in the claustrophobic space of a car, you both do and don’t know what’s going on. And like Mamma Mia! there are rhymes, puns and patterns. It’s utterly gorgeous to look at,” say Bradley. “And it’s quite funny. Not very precious,” she adds, mentioning a flat tyre made by running a car tyre over a piece of clay. “You have a right to relate to this thing.”

Sarah Urwin Jones

Emma Hart: BANGER, Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, 0131 225 2383, www.fruitmarket.co.uk Until 3 Feb 2019, Mon - Sun, 11am - 6pm

Critics Choice: Moving slowly north – if with giant’s footsteps - over the period of a year, this touring exhibition presents the work of six contemporary artists working in ceramics. Beginning at An Talla Solais in Ullapool, the exhibition stopped off in Thurso and has now reached Bonhoga, Shetland’s mill gallery, before its final stop in Fjell Festning Museum in Bergen, Norway, next January. Redesigned for the Bonhoga run, it is the gallery’s first ceramics-focused exhibition, showcasing a wide variety of contemporary ceramic work, from the more conceptual to the more functional.

The artists involved - Kjersti Sletteland and Tone Boska (who work together as the BIOSENARIO Collective), Ingeborg Blom Andersskog, Jenny Mackenzie Ross, Rebecca Brown and Siri Brekke – are a widely flung group from both Scotland and Norway, hence the exhibition’s dual title Northbound/Nordgaende. Ceramics are the core, but there is also work in painting, drawing, installation and video.

The work is redolent with narratives, new and old, of lines and traces, loosely exploring the ancient and modern connections between Scandinavia and Scotland. Brown’s work is the result of an interest in coastal folkore, investigated during a residency in Norway. Andersskog worked in An Talla Solais (Ullapool) for a week during the opening run creating new work that is now part of the touring exhibition.

But if the concepts and stories are there, it is about clay, too, in the end, an exploration of the sculptural qualities of this eminently plastic medium, and its interaction with other artistic disciplines. Catch it now in its last week at Bonhoga before it sets off over the northern seas to its final destination.

Northbound/Nordagaende, Bonhoga Gallery, Weisdale Mill, Weisdale, Shetland, 01595 745750, www.shetlandarts.org Until 4 Nov, Mon – Sat, 10.30am – 5pm, Sun 11am – 5pm

Don't miss: The little known history of the Scottish Sampler, and most particularly of the girls who sewed them some century or two ago, is the crux of this fascinating exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. Exhaustively researched by the American collector who owns these wonderful embroidered pieces, the unique facets of the Scottish tradition - not least the genealogical information contained on the samplers which facilitated research into the girls' lives - uncover many stories, from riches to poverty, lives urban and rural, all worked in cross stitch or double-running stitch, or any one of the many, many variations in stitch and colour and pattern that went in and out of fashion over the centuries.

Embroidered Stories: Scottish Samplers, National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh, 0300 123 6789 www.nms.ac.uk 26 Oct – 21 Apr 2019 Daily 10am – 5pm