To get to ceramist Raina Lee’s tree home, you enter by way of an iron gate with a canine warning signal and climb a protracted picket staircase that creaks beneath your toes. You’ll then cross a suspension bridge, and also you’ll hear, “Watch out, it’s very wobbly,” earlier than seeing Lee, 48. There, you’ll doubtless discover her with a mug in hand, leaning in opposition to the door body of her tree home and ready so that you can be a part of her at a Japanese-style tea desk.
Her serene retreat looks like a cabin in a nationwide park, but it’s perched on a slope in Lee’s Mount Washington yard, shaded by Brazilian pepper timber. The studio is house to dozens of her ceramic works, out there for viewing by appointment.
Video by Grace Xue
Lee’s items vary from small tea bowls ($640) to giant moon jars ($4,800), and her works could be discovered at high-end galleries reminiscent of Rhett Baruch in Hollywood and Verso in New York. For Mom’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and different holidays, she has gross sales of smaller, extra reasonably priced wares.
Yearly, Lee’s relations get “Christmas ceramics” as presents from her.
“I attempted to offer vases and cups to my aunt, however she doesn’t use them,” she says. “She put them on prime of her hearth to show. I’m like, ‘You understand you may simply use them. It’s not that helpful.’”
Modesty apart, Lee’s inventive journey started “by chance” in 2016 in Brooklyn, N.Y., the place she was dwelling subsequent door to Choplet, a ceramics studio and gallery. That’s the place she started making pottery.
After switching to a 24-hour studio referred to as Clay Area, Lee and good friend Minh Singer spent numerous night time periods collectively.
“We’d bicycle and one way or the other meet someplace on the way in which, ‘Goonies’-style, after which experience over to the studio at night time and keep till 4 a.m.,” Singer says. “She was very experimental and funky at night time, and at daytime, she would throw and do extra method.”
Lee, a former journalist who coated the tech and gaming industries, says she discovered satisfaction in the way in which ceramics allowed her to create “tangible objects from begin to end.”
When she transitioned to ceramics full-time, her household thought she was “actually loopy,” she says. Lee, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes. She says that artwork wasn’t a standard pursuit in her household and that maybe the closest factor she obtained to witness was her grandma’s occasional interest of conventional Chinese language portray.
“However I believe I’m sufficiently old now the place nobody is questioning that sort of stuff,” Lee says. “Possibly if I have been 20, that may have occurred. However now, it’s like no person cares.”
Whereas dwelling in New York, Lee joined a glaze-mixing class at Greenwich Home Pottery, which sparked her curiosity in creating her personal.
After transferring again to Los Angeles in 2017, Lee was in a position to develop her ceramics potentialities. She and her architect husband, Mark Watanabe, purchased a home, which Watanabe reworked together with the tree home. In her studio, Lee has positioned her kilns and pottery wheel and tried different firing methods reminiscent of raku and pit firing.
Having a house studio has made it simpler for Lee to experiment with pottery glazes. She‘s most happy with her volcanic glazes; they’re utilized earlier than pottery items are fired in a kiln for 4 to 12 hours. The end result? Distinctive crackly textures which can be uneven to the contact, both bumpy or pitted, very similar to craters on the moon.
As a result of her glazes are formulated with minerals, she jokingly says her works “find yourself wanting like rocks once more.”
“For instance, if you take a look at oyster shells, they’ve an iridescence of pearly inexperienced and blue, and that’s undoubtedly from minerals like copper,” she says. “I simply discover it fascinating that it’s the identical supplies recombined into one thing else, as a result of every thing within the earth is kind of like one factor.”
Nature is Lee’s essential supply of inspiration. When she’s not throwing clay on a wheel or hand-building clay items in her studio, she is within the wilderness across the nation happening hikes and discovering inspiration, which she posts about on Instagram, along with posts about her ceramics work and exhibits.
Ted Vadakan, a good friend of 20 years, says Lee usually takes reference photographs alongside the way in which and makes use of her watercolor to color what she noticed and what evokes her on the finish of every day of mountain climbing.
“She’s all the time observing issues regular folks don’t see,” says Vadakan. “She’ll be on the bluffs of the ocean and see all of the moss and lichen rising in numerous volcanic rock formations. I believe all these textures and colours that she sees are very obvious in her works.”
Lee’s experimentation with sculptural glazes and different firing methods has gained the eye of artwork sellers and curators reminiscent of Claire Vinson and Philip Williams of Stroll Backyard, a Los Angeles-based gallery for modern ceramics and sculpture, significantly works by feminine artists. Vinson and Williams featured Lee’s work of their inaugural exhibition in 2021, and they’re going to host her new present subsequent month. The exhibition, which opens Nov. 9, will function works impressed by Lee’s summer season studio residency and gallery visits in Paris.
“She appears to know all people,” says Vinson, including that Lee’s solo present introduced quite a lot of new faces to the gallery. “She’s so effectively related and engaged with the ceramics world and the artwork world in L.A.
“Raina has an openness to her that I believe is de facto central to how her work evolves over time,” Vinson provides. “She’s not afraid of outcomes which may appear bizarre or unintentional or appear to be errors. She takes all of it in stride.”
At “Calibration,” a gaggle exhibition in June on the LaiSun Keane gallery in Boston, Lee introduced 4 3D-printed items: three Chun meiping vases, which have been widespread varieties throughout China’s Music dynasty, and one “Tetris”-inspired piece of cong pottery, primarily based on a Chinese language Bronze Age type.
Having grown up in a home with conventional Chinese language furnishings and decor, Lee says she’s exceedingly intrigued by ceramics from the Music dynasty (960-1279).
“A number of one of the best glaze improvements have been throughout the Music dynasty, which was a thousand years in the past,” she says. “I used to be attempting to re-create totally different Music dynasty glazes, and I’ve been in a position to make comparable ones. So I’m excited about exploring that as a manner for me to personally time-travel and perceive what that historical past was like.”
These 3D-printed works have been the results of Lee’s experimental clay residency on the Expressive Computation Lab at UC Santa Barbara. There, Lee and researchers explored the way to develop new 3D printing programming together with machines that would work on much less predictable and secure supplies reminiscent of clay.
Nonetheless, it hasn’t been the smoothest. Lee says collapses occur usually throughout the printing section due to the moisture and malleability of the clay. She says she has needed to maintain and reshape the clay as a chunk is being printed, leaving a few of the vessels with warped shapes.
However Lee has embraced the imperfections and put these items out for exhibition.
LaiSun Keane, founding father of LaiSun Keane, says Lee’s 3D-printed vases sparked “a spectrum of reactions,” a lot in order that some guests “instantly disliked her work” after strolling into the exhibition. Regardless of that, Keane is glad that Lee’s work prompted guests and different artists to think about the potential of integrating ceramics and fashionable expertise.
“In case you don’t see it, how have you learnt you don’t prefer it?” Keane asks of Lee’s newer work.
Though 3D printing is totally different from Lee’s earlier items, folks can nonetheless inform it’s her work due to her constant use of historic Chinese language ceramic design.
Lee’s adventures in ceramics are usually not restricted to 3D printing. Her thirst for creation and curiosity about new supplies have propelled her to take part in varied residencies and workshops, reminiscent of making paper pulp sculptures at Mirena Kim’s studio in Mid-Metropolis and studying glass casting within the Yucca Valley.
“She’s virtually like a chameleon,” says Rachel Du, a Chinese language artwork specialist at Bonhams public sale home. “[She is] all the time enjoying with new glazes, new concepts and greater varieties and all the time pushing the medium to the subsequent stage.”
Lee’s self-discipline is clear in work and life. Vadakan says individuals who’ve visited her studio are impressed by the packing containers stuffed with little clay tiles with totally different textures and coloration combos, experiments which have turn into her reference library.
On the cabinets and tables within the studio are piles of Talenti gelato jars and takeout packing containers stuffed with coloration powders and mixtures.
Like her storage, which faces Division Avenue and the place passersby can see her sitting there engaged on items, Lee is an open ebook, “unafraid to place her work on the market to indicate the world,” says Jotham Hung, who related together with her by way of Instagram.
The 2 rapidly bonded by way of their shared Taiwanese American heritage, and Hung — who is predicated in San Marino — invited Lee to exhibit within the group present “Narrativo Creta” at Compound, a wellness, eating and exhibition house in Lengthy Seaside, from June to July.
As for the tree home, when it’s not getting used for exhibitions, it has turn into a spot for Lee to collect with mates or a spot for the general public to flock for seasonal gross sales. As a bonus, Lee is thought to supply pizza and different snacks to her guests.
Provides her good friend Singer: “She’s a feeder.” Final 12 months, the 2 had a pop-up at Lee’s tree home the place Singer offered her dishes and archival works from her Brooklyn studio.
So what’s it actually wish to have good friend just like the proficient Lee? Singer places it this fashion: Lee usually baked her favourite mushroom pâté and seed bread once they lived in Brooklyn. “When she left [New York], I used to be actually unhappy, as a result of she was just like the mushroom pâté on my seed bread.”
Alongside together with her time with mates, Lee says she enjoys seeing prospects’ “cute moments” whereas looking her ceramics for family members. Take, for instance, the time a person was attempting to choose a present for his daughter, and his daughter was attempting to get a present for her mother and father. However they have been pretending to not get presents for one another.
“I suppose I simply get very nice prospects,” Lee says. “It’s actually candy to see the identical folks come again to the studio gross sales yearly.”