In a one person show at the Frank Lloyd Gallery from April 2 – April 30, 2005, Jennifer Lee will present new work. The sixteen hand built pots have a simple grace that is at once organic and perfectly crafted.
Jennifer Lee's reductive, flawlessly formed vessels are testaments to her continued clarity of purpose. Lee has been exploring and distilling the vessel form for more than twenty years. As David Whiting described in Ceramics Monthly (October 2003):
"What is striking about the work is its constancy, the way in which she has been able to explore and fathom the constitution of clay and delineation of form through the endless possibilities of the cylinder and the bowl. Within these self-imposed parameters, her journey has, in a sense, moved inwards, gauging and regauging the interaction of profile and surface, interior and exterior, volume and lift".
Although quietly contemplative, Lee's work also has a dynamic intensity. Asymmetric smoky pot, haloed traces sits poised in a delicate equilibrium. The walls swell upward and outward from a minimal base that barely seems to meet the ground. A dark trace seeps across the body of the pot, echoing the angled rim.
Leah Ollman eloquently described Lee's pots in a 2002 review in the Los Angeles Times:
"Their textures and pigmentation do not just evoke natural elements and processes, but convey an equivalency with them. Lee's pots conjure the essence of sand, stone, silt and sedimentation. Breathtaking in their simplicity, they don't merely illustrate conditions of nature but elegantly, gracefully manifest them".
Hand built from coils of clay in accordance with age-old tradition, Lee's pots feel both modern and timeless. Their subtle but striking coloration comes from metallic oxides that are mixed into the clay body before each piece is formed. Using a rich range of tones, Lee fully integrates the bands, striations, and traces that define each pot. Wholly unified, her exquisite forms exude a quiet but emphatic confidence.
Jennifer Lee was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1956. She lives and works in London. She has had retrospective exhibitions of her work at the Rohsska Musset in Goteborg and Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery. Her work is represented in major public collections worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she exhibited in Clay into Art, 1999. She is also represented in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her work was included in the traveling exhibition Color and Fire, 2000.