March 2017: Lisa Conway & Hsin-Yi Huang

Hsin-Yi Huang is a ceramic artists working in porcelain. She has entitled her show “All is Flux”. “All is flux, nothing stays still” is what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus described as the fundamental essence of universe. “We encounter changes in our day-to-day life, our physical appearance, our insights, and relationships with others. In a society where our lives are interconnected, changes brought upon by climate variations, technology innovations, and displacements from wars, can bring on en masse emotions,” explains Huang. ““All is flux” examines the nature of change, how we perceive it, and how we react. Our human experience is the result of our reactions to change accumulated over time.  Each experience is uniquely valuable.” My hope is to seed the possibility of change. The future of ceramic arts has always been in flux. Change is the very essence and raw material for growth. She uses human and plant forms as her means to symbolize notions of beauty, fragility, and growth.  Her intent for this body of work is not to provide answers nor stoke emotions, but rather, to present change as facts. 

Lisa Conway works with hand-built earthenware. By strongly referencing the plant world in her work she hopes to avoid associations to any specific human anatomy. “I choose instead to evoke the subtler emotions and relationships that underlay our bodily responses.” Her latest work is hand-built earthenware, pinched or coiled into shape. She rotates the pieces and flips them upside-down as she builds in order to capture various angles and give her pieces a greater sense of volumetric capacity. The textures in her work are sometimes a natural result of the building process, or sometimes exaggerated in order to bring attention to a particular area or show color-variations within the glaze.  She mix a fair amount of cotton fiber into her clay body, which allows her to continually re-shape the piece during the building process.  This fiber completely burns out during the kiln firing. Conway explains, ”My pieces draw the viewer in to an evocative world of suggestions and questions on the relationships between people and the life force within us all. I want my pieces to remind us of our own bodies, the physical states we experience and how our sense of our own physicality changes in relationship to each other.”