About Vika Benson

Biography and art education

Vika Benson is a London-based sculptor working primarily in ceramics, alongside painting, drawing and collage. Her figurative stoneware sculptures explore the body as a vessel for memory, care and transformation.

Born in Abkhazia, Georgia (then part of the USSR) in 1964, she spent twenty-two years in Israel working as a senior medical doctor before moving to England in 2014 to pursue art full time. This background informs her attention to the body, vulnerability and repair.

Her art education includes Morley College, Hampstead School of Art, The Essential School of Painting, Turps Banana and private mentoring with Ceri Hand.

Benson has exhibited at The Essential School of Painting in 2022 and 2024, Boomer Gallery, and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025, where her painted and glazed stoneware sculpture Doctor was selected and sold.

Working intuitively with stoneware, paint, glaze, charcoal and collage, she builds psychologically charged figures that balance humour, tenderness and unease.

Artist statement

My practice begins with the human figure. I build bodies as vessels—forms that can hold memory, care, vulnerability and transformation. Medicine, migration and the experience of making a life in different countries are part of the work’s emotional ground.

Ceramics gives me a direct, physical language. I hand-build in stoneware and work with painted and glazed surfaces, allowing each figure to retain marks of touch and process. Alongside sculpture, I continue to work in painting, drawing and collage.

I am interested in the point where strength and fragility meet. The figures are not portraits; they are carriers of inner states, inviting viewers to bring their own histories and emotions to them.