Early in the planning of this show, Berrow set out to make a broader statement about contemporary femininity. The rise of “trad wife” aesthetics online was one of her initial touch points. But midway through, she realized: “Oh my god, this is all about me.” The work became a reflection on the women in her family, in particular, “the roles they played and disappeared into,” she says, and the ways love in her family has most often been expressed through food. She recalls arriving at her grandmother’s house as a little girl and finding the table already set with multiple desserts: “Tiramisu for me, lime coconut jelly for my sister, blackcurrant jelly for my mother, and she always had pots of sweets all over the house,” she says. “There was such a lightness and joy in her cooking.” Years later, when Berrow became a pastry chef herself, she began to understand her inheritance more viscerally. “It’s also parallel to what I do now,” she says. “The way you knead dough is basically how you knead clay.”
Ceramics was something Berrow stumbled into almost by accident, when the pandemic interrupted her work in the kitchen. She had taken the job after briefly studying fashion and leaving university. She moved back home and began to experiment in her mother’s studio. “It suddenly became this place for me to explore,” she says of the medium that had always belonged to her mother. “Now, I use all the same clay,” she adds. As she spent more time working in clay, she began to realize that what she inherited from her grandmother was an understanding of making as an act of love, and from her mother the material through which to preserve it. She soon began arranging her objects into tablescapes, using the familiar language of domestic life.
As Berrow developed her ideas for “What Slips Beneath the Sugar” more, it became clear that she was also confronting what she calls the “fermented feelings” beneath the domestic ideal of the ’70s in America: the frustration, the ambivalence, and the tensions that women felt they had to swallow. Her new works emerged not as an indictment of the women in her family, but as an attempt to understand the emotional undercurrents of a life that, for them, was both chosen and prescribed. This emotional residue has long been central to her practice—though it’s funny, too. “There’s a humor to being at a house party with like ten cigarettes piled into this tiny bottle cap at the end,” Berrow says. “It’s so unthinking, and yet if you can take that tiny moment, freeze it, and put it in front of somebody in clay, it is suddenly so rich with narrative.”
The artist wants viewers to get close, to reach for a cigarette that she admits “looks nothing like a fucking cigarette,” and feel their brain make that strange click of recognition anyway. And then there’s the way people bring their own lives into the room. She remembers how someone once walked into a tablescape and told her, “Oh, this room is so sad.” The observation shocked Berrow, who saw the show as an emblem of female empowerment, fantasy, and childlike glee. At another show, a spectator threw a glass of wine at her work and stormed out, visibly disturbed. There are those who arrive with grief, too. “I’ve met people whose parents have died from lung cancer,” she says, “and they want me to make an ashtray to immortalize their father because even though smoking is what killed him, it’s what he loved, and it’s what reminds them of him.”
If the 1970s tablescape was meant to symbolize perfection, Berrow’s version acknowledges its impossibility. Hers is a feast that admits its own consequences. And like the title suggests, the sweetness is never the whole story. Unlike her mother and grandmother, who stepped more readily into the roles expected of them, Berrow’s life remains deliberately unresolved. She is still, in her words, “running around,” but the past is not so easily escaped. “At least now,” she says of that era, “I can say, that was a different time.”
"Alma Berrow: What Slips Beneath the Sugar" is on view from February 24 to March 28, 2026 at Megan Mulrooney at 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90046.
