May Artists Of The Month

This month we are featuring works of the following members:

Lyn Brown, Elaine Yoneoka, and Kingsley Weihe

During this month you can enjoy %10 discount on all the works of our featured artists.

Lyn Brown

Lyn Brown loves paper.“My process, and my inspiration, always start with the paper itself: meticulous Japanese silkscreens, gorgeous hand-marbled papers from master marblers, and so much more,” she explains. “Each kind of paper has its own particular qualities like weight, color, light permeability, texture, and tensile strength..” Brown learned how to bind books by taking books apart to figure out how they were made and then making her own. “The elements of bookbinding really appeal to me,” she says. “The precision required, the paper itself, the process, and the end result―a useful and beautiful object―are all deeply satisfying.” Highly inventive, the artist makes paper-covered items that include light-switch plates, magnetic photo frames, photo albums, playing-card boxes, wine journals, and blank books. She buys wire lampshade frames, covers them with various papers, and adds beaded trim; she enjoys working with customers to make custom lampshades.

Kingsley Weihe

Trained as an architect, Kingsley Weihe makes elegant ceramics that display her design skills. “My background in architecture is definitely the strongest influence on my work in clay,” she explains. “Both satisfy and illustrate my simultaneous interests in science and art, but only clay allows me the intimate relationship with both the process and the product. Many of my designs are inspired by primitive decorative motifs, particularly African. I delight in the slight inexactness of handwork. I do not lay out my designs beforehand and often end up with too much or not enough space when I come full circle, but it is just this deviation that excites me. The marks reflect the tools and the hands that made them. No two designs are ever alike; rather, each one builds on the ones that came before. Recently I have been looking at textiles for my inspiration: fabrics, rugs, and wallpapers that have led me to more curvilinear shapes and patterns.” The artist makes all her work at Feet of Clay Pottery in Brookline Village where she has been a member since 1991. All of her work is high-fired stoneware and is fully functional.  All pieces are food-, dishwasher-, microwave-, and oven-safe.

Elaine Yoneoka

“The art of my ceramic work,” Elaine Yoneoka says, “is to take the materials of clay and glaze and transform them into light, texture, and color. This work is raku fired―a special quick-firing process that was first developed in Japan 400 years ago and modified to its present form in the 1970s. It entails heating the ware very fast until the glaze is molten, then individually smoking each piece after it is taken out of the kiln and left to cool to room temperature within 10 minutes. Pieces are finally quenched with water to ‘set’ the glaze and cool the piece. This gives my work an air of spontaneity that comes from its interaction with the elements of fire and smoke and renders each piece unlike any others with both subtle and dramatic color changes. Unlike most raku work, the clay is waterproof, so the vases can hold water.”The artist has adapted a technique that has traditionally been used for pots to produce many other objects, both useful and beautiful. She has been expanding her simple but elegant jewelry line and uses wire wrapping to embellish pieces.

Shibori dyed silk scarves, a fairly new addition to her work, are wrapped and tied, or compressed in other ways such as folding, pleating, or sewing, before being dyed. The results, like those of raku firing, are a delightful surprise.