Maddy Inez’s Ceramic Plants Carry Family History Into View
In Los Angeles, ceramist Maddy Inez is using clay to trace a lineage that runs through gardening, Black women’s labor, and the afterlife of wildfire. Her first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney, Nascence, gathers 20 ceramic vessels and wall works made over the past year, each dedicated to a distinct plant variety.
Inez, the daughter of American artist Alison Saar and the granddaughter of assemblage pioneer Betye Saar, has built a practice around hand-built biomorphic forms that draw on mysticism and ancestral knowledge. In Nascence, those forms have grown larger and more assertive. They are less delicate than earlier works, more earthbound, and often eerily humanoid. Benne Blessing, for instance, transforms the West African sesame plant benne into a kind of botanical warrior, with two pods that resemble armored legs.
The artist’s process begins long before she touches clay. She researches each plant’s folklore, medicinal uses, and culinary history, filling notebooks with watercolor studies and handwritten notes. That attention to plant life first took on new urgency in Fire Followers, the series she made after the 2025 L.A. wildfires. During the evacuations, Inez, her brother, her mother, and her grandmother left home with six dogs, two bunnies, two tortoises, and a cat. The experience sharpened her sense of plants as both witnesses and healers. “Fire follower plants heal soil,” she said, describing them as a source of hope after loss.
Nascence extends that inquiry into broader histories of displacement and survival. Inez has been looking closely at plants linked to the slave trade and at the ways botanical knowledge traveled through forced migration and colonial power. In Heart Healer, hibiscus becomes a point of entry into North African folklore, particularly in Sudan. Other works, including Leeser Root Worker, Za’ atar Pistil, Sibyl Seedlings, Beholder, Al ‘Ouna, Crimson Kin, and Wanderer, continue that blend of plant study, myth, and bodily form.
The exhibition also emerged from a personal archival discovery. While sorting documents belonging to her grandmother, Betye Saar, at the family’s Laurel Canyon home, Inez found a midwifery certificate for her great-great–great-grandmother, Hannah Mays, a native of Louisiana. That document opened another thread in the work, linking the artist to Black midwifery and to a tradition of care that survived under slavery and beyond.
For Inez, the garden is not a metaphor so much as a record. Nascence suggests that clay can hold inheritance, grief, and ecological memory at once — and that the language of plants may still offer a way to think about repair.
