The Los Angeles ceramicist Maddy Inez works with clay to trace the movement of plants, people and history. Named to the Artsy Vanguard 2027, the platform’s annual list of ten emerging artists to watch, she builds her sculptures by hand, coiling clay into vessels that begin as botanical research and end as forms that read like bodies.

Born in 1993, Inez takes a single plant and breaks its history down into seed pods, stems and pistils, then reassembles those parts into near-humanoid shapes. Her recent work follows plants that were carried across continents through enslavement and displacement, from okra to black-eyed peas and hibiscus. In “Benne Blessing”, a 2026 sculpture inspired by benne, the West African sesame plant, two pods resemble armour-clad legs on a botanical warrior, while “Heart Healer” takes the hibiscus flower, used across North Africa to make karkadé tea and healing remedies, as its starting point.

Art runs through her family. Her mother is the artist Alison Saar, her grandmother was the pioneering assemblage artist Betye Saar, and her brother Kyle Leeser is also an artist. Inez has said that clay offers her a way to explore the connections between people, plants and history, and that her sculptures are rooted in mysticism and ancestral knowledge, drawing on mythology, alchemy, science fiction and herbal medicine.

She is represented by Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles, where she presented “Nascence”, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, in the spring of 2026. The show brought together 20 ceramic vessels and wall works made over the previous year, each dedicated to a different plant variety. Her work has also appeared at EXPO Chicago and the Felix Art Fair, and she is due to present a solo booth with the gallery at Frieze Los Angeles in 2027. The Vanguard, now in its ninth year, was drawn from more than 900 nominations from galleries around the world, and this year adds an acquisition prize with the Brooklyn Museum, whose winner will be announced on 13 November.