The Lightness of Being
Ceramics by Sabra Moon Elliot, Katherine Glenday, Yuko Nishikawa, Yoona Hur and Leah Kaplan
August 6th - September 3rd, 2022
The Lightness of Being celebrates five extraordinary female ceramicists under one roof, each exploring environment, healing and movement in unique ways, while in dialogue with one another.
Lisa Perry is thrilled to announce The Lightness of Being: Ceramics by Leah Kaplan, Sabra Moon Elliot, Yoona Hur and Yuko Nishikawa, at Onna House from August 6-September 3, 2022. The exhibition also features Katherine Glenday, presented in partnership with Les Ateliers Courbet.
Cape Town-born Katherine Glenday’s porcelain pieces defy their materiality, stretching the matter to its thinnest; their translucent skin enthralls with natural light while their silhouettes embody the artist’s gesture as it quietly evokes movement. Leah Kaplan is an American ceramicist who also explores porcelain; her signature porcelain vessels blend fluidity with minimalism, belying intricate construction that beckons viewers to take a closer look. Her process is rooted in age-old handbuilding techniques, such as pinching, coiling and slab-building, but her deep dive into porcelain’s materiality often yields surprising results. Bridgehampton-based Sabra Moon Elliot explores the play between dichotomy and balance in her ceramic work, which is created through the repetition of loosely painted or sculpted geometric shapes. New York City-based Yoona Hur moved from Seoul, South Korea to the United States at a young age. The desire to deepen her Asian identity and spirituality drove her to explore nature and meditation across ancient ceramics, traditional Korean arts and Eastern philosophy. Brooklyn-based Yuko Nishikawa creates awe-inspiring environments and installations exploring color and texture, typically working with mobiles and ceramic sculptures.
Lisa Perry has been a long-time advocate of women's rights and a lover and creator of design in many forms. Onna House combines her passions under one roof while supporting and fostering the growth of women artists; The Lightness of Being continues that support in an effort to highlight five women creating profound bodies of work. Inspired by the Japanese sensibilities of the house’s architecture, Perry named the space Onna (own-ah), as an homage to the word woman in Japanese. Today the work at Onna House varies widely, bringing together works by international and U.S. artists and designers, including local artists from the Hamptons.
Lisa says….
"My mother owned an art gallery outside of Chicago in the early '70s and she specialized in ceramics, which was more commonly referred to as pottery back then. I was immediately drawn to these vessels and their unique shapes, sizes and textures. Fast-forward to today, I'm thrilled to present a ceramics show at Onna House, showcasing work from five female artists who share the same sensibilities of the artists who my mother showcased those many years ago, when I first fell in love with these pots! I'm especially proud to highlight women artists, a focus that sadly wasn’t seen in my mom's era."
Born in 1960 in Cape Town, South African ceramicist Katherine Glenday discovered her vocation under the mentorship of leading ceramicist Marietjie van der Merwe. Glenday explores the material’s wide range of expressive qualities while continuing to learn different time-honored techniques through ongoing collaboration with master ceramicists around the world.
Highly informed by the visual arts painting and drawing, her porcelain works explore the contrasts of emphasized organic textures on soft skin-like surfaces. While refining her technical dexterity and her artistic signature, Glenday has grown a cohesive body of work comprised of delicate vessels that accentuate the porcelain’s lightness and translucent quality.
Employing a variety of forming methods, most notably wheel throwing and occasionally slip casting, she sees the vessel as a circular canvas in movement. Inviting color and light in the pure matter, she introduces minerals and oxides often gleaned directly from the natural world, such as mud from the Niger River or clay from the Cedarburg, as her “paint.”
Although the formation of her work is often visceral and full of movement, the resulting pieces emanate a meditative quality. Like autobiographical elements, many of Glenday’s works mainly result from the artist’s intuition with the subtle guidance of her skilled hands. More gestural and intentional, her most recent series have focused on exploring positive and negative space in porcelain, subtly echoing Franz Kline in his use of abstracted black “brush” strokes to create an interplay between light and dark.
Leah Kaplan has been working in clay for more than 30 years, honing her skills in studios and schools up and down the East Coast. In 2018 Leah renovated a studio in Old City Philadelphia, where she launched her full time practice. Leah’s eclectic career path to ceramics included promoting New York City designers, as well as helping global artisans find markets for their work. In the latter path, Leah was fortunate to meet gifted craftspeople, engaged in every conceivable medium, whose work continues to inform her practice decades later.
Leah’s vessels have been shown in internationally juried shows across the United States and can be found in corporate and private collections.
Beyond her studio practice, Leah devotes time to The Clay Studio, a national nonprofit arts organization where she serves on the board. Leah lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children.
Sabra Moon Elliot received a Bachelor of Science in film from New York University and studied art history at Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy. Growing up she explored many different mediums, such as painting and film, and attended art classes at the National Academy of Design.
Her work explores the play between dichotomy and balance, which is created through the repetition of loosely painted or sculpted geometric shapes. The artist lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and has exhibited with Tripoli Gallery since 2015.
Yoona Hur is a female artist based in New York City. She was born in Seoul, South Korea but moved to North America at a young age - the desire to deepen her Asian identity and spirituality drove her journey as an artist after working as an architect for several years.
Hur’s sculptures and paintings are rooted in the exploration of nature and meditation across ancient ceramics, traditional Korean arts and Eastern philosophy. She works with clay and paper because of their universal and tactile quality; nearly every ancient culture used these materials for ceremonies and rituals due to their deep and direct connection to soil and trees.
Hur says of her work: “There’s this incredible aspect of forgiving and healing when I work with these mediums. They are free and embracing, yet I am constantly challenged to be decisive and ready to ‘let go’ and not become attached when things break or tear. I hope to express both expansiveness and vulnerability in my work, so viewers can feel and reflect their own interiority. The final form can be perceived as a meditative space where one is invited to pause, contemplate, heal and awaken to the higher versions of ourselves.”
Yuko Nishikawa creates fantastical environments with colorful, textural lively forms using a hands-on, exploratory approach to make paintings, lighting, mobiles and sculptures in a variety of mediums including clay, wire and fabrics, as well as repurposed materials such as recycled paper and used eyewear lenses. Her work reflects her accumulative experiences in architecture, restoration, interior and furniture design, crafts and engineering. Growing up in a small seaside town just south of Tokyo, Japan, she received her BFA in Interior Design from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 2002.
Her work has evolved and expanded beyond her earlier ceramic sculptures. Highlights include a project during quarantine in which she painted one painting per day for one hundred days; window displays with mobiles and paintings for French fashion brand Sandro’s 52 world-wide stores and the immersive mobile installation Memory Functions in one of The Brooklyn Home Company’s eco-friendly condominiums in Brooklyn.
She currently works in her studio in the industrial area in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, which she built out with friends utilizing demolished materials found in the building. She named this space Forest: a place where things grow and things decay to nourish new lives, and where people wonder and discover something new. In this space, for four years, she hosted the monthly Salon at Forest, a gathering and conversation of creative minds, which has been on pause since the beginning of the pandemic.
