Bisila Noha

Art career After moving to London, Noha began taking pottery classes and crafting her first pottery pieces. Without a background in the arts, she was largely self-taught, designing pottery to relax after work. Her initial designs focused on crafting practical clay tableware. Noha's technique developed to craft works combining storytelling to "blur the boundaries" between sculpture and tableware.

Noha continued to refine her technique through travel, learning from traditional potters in Mexico, Italy, Armenia and Morocco. Inspired by the work of women from the global south, her work seeks to challenge contemporary ideas about authorship, design and labour. Noha additionally uses her pottery to explore her own identity and heritage. For example, she describes mixing using different colours of glaze as a metaphor to connect with her mixed race identity and experimenting with traditional Spanish pottery designs to showcase her Spanish heritage.

In 2020, she began the "Baney Clay Project", a series of works using clay that was brought back from the Baney village in Equatorial Guinea, the site of her father's ancestral home. She used the project to engage with her African identity, and to explore her "rebirth as a racialised woman". Noha has subsequently incorporated the volcanic red clays from Bioko island, and the home of her grandfather in her works.

In 2022, Noha held her first solo exhibition, ‘Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self’, in Bordeaux. Today, Noha's work is found in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Crafts Council, Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and the National Museum of Scotland.

Activism Outside of her artwork, Noha is a community activist, advocating for social justice and diversity in the arts industry. She leads the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre and is a co-director of Lon-art Creative, a social activism organization for creatives. Noha also works with Design Can, an initiative advocating for more inclusivity in the design industry. 2021 – OFF – Focus Céramiques d'art', Bordeaux, France 2022 – Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art, at Two Temple Place and York Art Gallery 2022-23 – Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self, Solo Exhibition, Galerie REVEL, Bordeaux 2023 – Solo Exhibition, Unit London 2024 – Miradas ecofeministas en el arte ecuatoguineano at the Spanish Cultural Centres in Bata and Malabo, Equatorial Guinea 2025 – Artist's Residency G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos