JENNIFER LEE
JL-0035
JENNIFER LEE 29 September - 27 October 2016
Private View Wednesday 28 September, 6-8pm Artist Present
Jennifer Lee will also be at the gallery on Saturday 8 October, from 10:30am-4:30pm
15 Royal Arcade 28 Old Bond Street London, W1S 4SP +44 (0) 20 7491 1706 mail@erskinehallcoe.com www.erskinehallcoe.com
New Worlds Change, for Jennifer Lee, comes slowly. As she puts it, “I think that I will always be on this long, slow trajectory.” For thirty years she has worked with the same forms and materials, hand-building her beautiful, poised stoneware vessels, their unglazed surfaces carefully burnished to bring out the qualities of her coloured clays. Each pot has the integrity of an original creation, absolute in its perfect balance and distinctive palette. The flashing bands and haloes of contrasting clay, evoking flashes of lightning or the break of sunlight through cloud, underscore the elemental drama of each new birth. And yet each pot is also in conversation with the pots Lee has made before and the pots that will come after. In a group, choices become distinct - the angle of the shoulder, the tilt of the rim, the width of the narrow shelf that Lee sometimes creates at the mouth of the pot, the balance of colours: sand, shale, graphite, pale and dark olive, the spaces carved out in air between the pots. You become attuned to the power of small differences. The last two years however have seen a more dramatic shift in Lee’s work. The invitation to take up a seven week residency at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shigaraki, Japan, in 2014, followed by a two month return visit in 2015, and then a further month in the autumn of 2015, has resulted in a series of remarkable red pots, made from locally-sourced red clay. These pots are unmistakably Lee’s, with their familiar sophisticated vocabulary of form and the subtle play of differently coloured clays, dark red with red, iron against red, and yet these are exotic cousins rather than brothers to Lee’s paler stoneware pots. They have a wholly different visual presence, and a warmth, weight and intensity that marks them out. Where Lee’s other pots are etherial, even metaphysical, gesturing to the stars and the birth of galaxies, these are of the earth, earthy. It is as if they hale from the red core of our own planet, rooted and elemental. Jennifer Lee has had a long association with Japan. She first visited in 1994, on the occasion of an exhibition of her work at Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo. For some years already the Japanese designer Issey Miyake had admired her work and in 2009 Lee was invited to participate in the exhibition U-Tsu-Wa, at 21_21 Design Sight, The Miyake Issey Foundation in Tokyo. The exhibition, designed by the architect Tadao Ando, featured ceramic vessels by Lee and Lucie Rie and the beautiful wooden bowls of Ernst Gamperl. Among other temperamental affinities, Lee shares with
JL-0033
the Japanese a profound love of nature and natural materials - stone, wood, clay, natural fibres. Born in rural North-East Scotland, among hills, fields, forests and rocky mountains, exposed to wild weather, and northern seas, this sensibility is expressed in her London studio by the collections of leaves, twigs, bark, mosses, stones, and other found objects, she has always about her, and in her work, by her sensitive handling of stoneware, which seems to reflect the geology of her native country. Initially Lee had intended to use a Japanese clay, similar to the clay she uses in London, while she was in Japan. However, in the inspiring context of one of Japan’s six ancient kiln sites, she began to experiment. “Going to Japan allowed me to play,” she says. She encountered directly the incredible drama of the anagama kiln, which requires stoking continuously for over six days. She was given a bag of “Tricky” clay, a translucent stoneware from Shigaraki, a bit like porcelain, which she found so difficult to handle that she began throwing, taking the forms to the point where they would almost collapse. She used Japanese brushes and Sumi ink to draw and made prints using seaweed. And she began to make two dimensional ceramic slabs, with streaks of oxide coloured clay like paint or ink running through them. “I worked 18 - 20 hour days. It was addictive and energising,” she reports. The most significant development, however, has been Lee’s discovery of the potential of red clay. Harder to work than her usual clay, it has higher shrinkage and a distinct metallic tonality. When the clay is coloured, the contrasts are inevitably more subtle, more elusive than in her usual stoneware, and indeed Lee has exaggerated this, leaving one dark pot unpolished to emphasise its dusky mystery. For, perhaps counterintuitively, these new pots, far from representing a break with the past, seem instead to express a reaching back and digging deep into the primordial origins of vessel making. Very early in her career, after her first degree at Edinburgh College of Art, Lee spent eight months on a travelling scholarship to the USA where she researched South-West Native American prehistoric ceramics. She has also been inspired by the pre-dynastic pottery of Egypt. These red pots, which, like her exquisite paler stoneware vessels resist utility absolutely, seem to rise directly from these archaic prototypes, grounded in the human instinct to find meaning in emptiness encircled by clay. Emma Crichton-Miller, 2016 author and arts journalist
JL-0034, JL-0036
JL-0041
JL-0043
JL-0047
JL-0051
JL-0038
JL-0040
JL-0048, JL-0052
JL-0046
JL-0044
JL-0042
JL-0049
JL-0037
JL-0050 back and front
All works are handbuilt coloured stoneware JL-0033 Dark olive, haloed umber rings, 2016, 19 x 14.9 x 14.7 cm JL-0034 Shigaraki Red, dark speckled trace, dark rim, tilted shelf, 2016, 23 x 13.9 x 13.2 cm JL-0035 Sand-grained, haloed olive ring, 2016, 15.4 x 12.3 x 11.9 cm JL-0036 Shigaraki Red, dark rim, dark base, tilted shelf, 2015, 15.1 x 10.8 x 10.4 cm JL-0037 Shigaraki Pale, flashing olive, haloed granite traces, 2015, 20.2 x 31.8 x 1 cm JL-0038 Banded graphite, olive, speckled bands, tilted shelf, 2016, 34.6 x 19.5 x 17.4 cm JL-0039 Pale shale, haloed granite ring, 2013-15, 25.5 x 17.7 x 17.2 cm JL-0040 Pale, three speckled ring traces, 2016, 20.6 x 28.6 x 28 cm JL-0041 Pale, rust sand-specked bands, tilted shelf, 2016, 28.7 x 16.7 x 15.4 cm JL-0042 Speckled shale, haloed granite, olive bands, tilted, 2015, 25.9 x 16 x 14.8 cm JL-0043 Speckled shale, olive, granite, flashing bands, tilted, 2016, 23.5 x 13.2 x 12 cm JL-0044 Sand-grained, rust specked band, haloed olive traces, tilted shelf, 2016, 22 x 12.8 x 12 cm JL-0045 Pale shale, olive, granite, peat, haloed bands, 2015, 5.3 x 12.5 x 12.2 cm JL-0046 Shigaraki Red, spangled, flashing, tilted shelf, 2015, 14.8 x 8.3 x 8.3 cm JL-0047 Shigaraki Red, dark, red rim, flashing, 2015, 9.3 x 18 x 17.8 cm JL-0048 Shigaraki Red, dark, red rim, flashing, 2014, 9.1 x 14.3 x 14 cm JL-0049 Diptych, Shigaraki olive, dark, sand-specked, flashing traces, 2015, 19 x 38.8 x 1.1 cm JL-0050 Speckled graphite stone, dark flashed traces, 2016, 20.4 x 30.4 x 1.1 cm JL-0051 Shigaraki Red, dark iron, red tilted shelf, 2016, 16.9 x 10.9 x 10.7 cm JL-0052 Pale, haloed olive, peat, granite, speckled trace, 2016, 5.9 x 12.9 x 12.6 cm
Front Cover: JL-0034 Back Cover: JL-0039
JL-0045
Jennifer Lee working in the Guest Artist’s Studio, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, 2014 Photograph by Jake Tilson
The exhibition is illustrated online at www.erskinehallcoe.com/exhibitions/jennifer-lee-2016/ Design by fivefourandahalf Printed by Pure Print Photography by Michael Harvey