PHOTOS BY WILL FOSTER
Jennie Jieun Lee makes plenty of glossy, pretty pieces that would look lovely alongside other objects in your home, but there’s a real depth of feeling that distinguishes her work. The large ceramic masks she’s been showing in galleries have a visceral, unsettling quality and a sly humor. But even her more practical goods — plates, bowls, cups, and creamers — convey moodiness and urgency, something you don’t often find yourself saying about tableware. “I think it was because of all those years I was stuck,” she says. “It was dying to come out.”
For more than a decade, Lee suffered a creative block. After graduating in 1999 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she majored in printmaking and ceramics, she ended up working in fashion, “learning a lot, but not necessarily liking it.” It was only a couple of years ago that she returned to her own practice, drawn back by the “hypnotic” act of throwing clay on a wheel and the release she found in the medium. Born in Seoul, Lee immigrated with her family to New York when she was four. “One of the reasons I started making the masks is that when I first moved to America in the ’70s, my mom took me to a ceramics class. I remembered how fun that was, so I tried to recreate that.” Her friend, artist Eddie Martinez, encouraged her to “make more, and make them big” for a group show called “Bad Fog,“ which he curated at New York’s Martos Gallery last January. “That’s when it gained momentum and people responded.”
Masks, of course, are loaded with symbolism and though Lee turned to them to recapture a childhood joy, they also became about her struggle with agoraphobia, feeling frustrated, “and the strange faces we need to present in life as adults.” Freelancing as a casting agent once on a project for a major department store, Lee watched would-be models “put on these smiles, and I knew some of them were not very happy. This one kid, I could hear him breathing through the smile. He was trying so hard and it was like he was stuck in this purgatory.” That tension and heartbreak became the theme of her solo show “Smile Purgatory,” which opened this summer at Lefebvre et Fils in Paris and runs for a few more weeks.
This past year has been a super productive one, perhaps because it took such a long time to come. We caught up with Lee at her Brooklyn studio to get a better sense of how she got there and to catch a glimpse of what’s next.
Lee spends about half of her time on vessels and art objects and the other half on her tabletop products. “Each one is like a piece of art, because I put so much into it.” With her more commercial works, she’s been advised to come up with a less time-intensive, more cost-effective method, “but it’s hard to.”
Her typical process: “There are two firings,” bisque firing and then glaze firing. “I do some processes on pieces prior to the final firing. But most of it is done after the bisque firing. I just layer on a lot of glazes, underglazes, and oxides.”
Fans of Girls might recognize this wall of windows. The episode where Hannah gets a game of naked Ping-Pong going with a divorced doctor played by Patrick Wilson was shot here. Lee and her boyfriend, artist Graham Collins, now live on the ground level of the building and turned the sunroom into a studio.
At center, the wheel where Lee and Collins throw pots. On the wall, to the left, is Sunset Park, a painting Lee made when she got back into her own work, though she found painting to be “almost too cerebral. I was thinking about it too much. When I switched to ceramics I was able to let go. I make it, slap some glaze on it, and then it’s in the kiln. It’s up to the fire to deal with it.”
When Lee got back into ceramics, she found a supportive network at Clayspace 1205, a communal ceramics facility in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “It was such a great, welcoming environment.” Now she keeps her clay, glazes, and other materials at her own studio in Fort Greene and fires her pieces with a Skutt kiln in her basement.
Lee discovered Clayspace when she went to a holiday sale there a few years ago and came across this little guy, which was made by the daughter of Janine Sopp, owner of Clayspace. The hair was created with a garlic press, a trick Lee now uses in her own work.
“I try new glazes and new colors. I made glazes at Clayspace, and I make clear here right now. But I would like to start making more of the glazes at home instead of just ordering the colors premade, just to experiment. Ideally, I would like to learn glaze chemistry.”
A cracked bowl Lee used as a test tile for glazes.
“Whenever I feel like I’m getting bored, I’ll look on Pinterest or Google or something, and there’s somebody showing a new technique. Me and my boyfriend, we watch YouTube videos, and sometimes in bed, of people throwing. I’m sure that’s common,” she jokes.
Lee uses various brushes to hand paint her pieces. She’ll also scratch into the clay with styluses and needle tools.
A plate of handmade rollers. Lee fires and then presses them into wet clay to make patterns and indentations in which “the glazes later pool nicely.”
At far left, a porcelain mask, In Orbit, which Lee showed at Ille Arts in Amagansett, NY, this summer. In the middle is a stoneware bowl, inspired by the drawings of Simone Shubuck. And at right, a sculpture Lee made last year called Halfway Down, alluding to what “people feel when they jump off a building and regret it halfway down.”
Lee draws color inspiration from painters like Marlene Dumas, Chaim Soutine, Cy Twombly, and Kandinsky. Film has also been a big influence, specifically the blurry city lights and dark glow of the opening credits in Taxi Driver and the desaturated look of Godard’s Weekend. Of the pink, she says she often mixes it with more somber hues: “I probably rejected a lot of my femininity for so many years, and now I’m like, fuck it. I’m embracing it.”
One of the first pieces Lee made when she got back into ceramics – a replica of the original mask she made as a kid, shortly after moving to the US.
Masks Lee has made for upcoming shows. The purple one, Sizzling Gohbah, was included in the show this past summer at Ille Arts. Her more functional pottery is currently available at The Primary Essentials, Jumelle, VPL, Bushwick Cooperative, Boerum House & Home, and the Australian shop Mr. Kitly. Rachel Comey will also carry some of Lee’s pieces at her New York store this holiday season.
To make the masks, Lee first puts the clay through a slab roller. “During the drying process sometimes they crack. But also, my kiln is not that big, so I have to cut them in certain divisions in order to fit. Then I glue the pieces together afterwards, but I feel like the cracks kind of work with the whole thought process.”
A mask from 2013 by Lee, titled Mud Up (he’s got his). If it calls to mind smeared eye make-up and a hangover, well, it’s meant to be the face of someone wearing “the same clothes from the night before,” says Lee.
The masks “are just getting more and more abstract,” says Lee. This one is in its initial drying state. “It takes a few weeks for them to dry fully before the first firing.”
Most of the ceramics here are Lee’s, though the white sculpture (lower left) is by Collins and the pitcher (upper left) is from the Italian town of Deruta. “They’ve been making ceramics there since the Middle Ages.” Lee and Collins visited this past summer. The painting (center) is by Matthew Chambers.
Early prototypes for larger scale sculptures Lee will be making.
From left to right: handmade dolls Lee picked up in Tulum; a white porcelain vessel by artist Ulrika Strömbäck; a vase glazed by her mother, Hea-young Lee; small bullet-shaped vessel by Graham Collins; Lee’s “Crater” creamer; an ashtray she made as a Chanukah gift; photos from friends.
Lee describes the piece at the top as “a ghost and he has a friend that goes with him but he’s not pictured here. I titled it after the coffee place I go to down the street: He looks like how I feel when I’ve had too much and there’s no going back.” To the right is a Christmas tree ornament Lee made for her sister, Lila, who lives in Sweden. The other pieces are early mugs along with Lee’s “Crater” creamer and “Suzanne” vase.
A table of Lee’s vessels that will likely be displayed at future gallery shows. She’s currently preparing for a 2015 show at the Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY. The tall sculpture of steel rectangles in the background is by Brooklyn-based artist J McDonald.
If designers are especially complicit in adding things to the world — and for stoking our desire for more and more stuff — they also get first dibs on the act of destruction. “I smash my own pieces all the time,” says Los Angeles-based ceramic artist Heather Levine. “You have to make quite a bit to get what you like, and I don’t keep all the tests. I’ll destroy them or try to make them into something else. I don’t want to see things in the world that I’m not happy about.”
When he was an art student in the '80s — in Kassel first, and then Berlin — Markus Linnenbrink worked primarily with grays and blacks. “I had no idea what to do with color,” he admits. “And honestly, I was a little afraid of it.” Which is ironic, considering that for more than a decade, the German-born, Brooklyn-based artist has built a body of work that centers around thick streaks of color — painted in stripes on gallery walls, poured in puddles on the floors of art-fair booths and installations, and dripped in lines down the face of his canvases. “Somehow a field trip to Italy where we spent three weeks painting outside got me into the idea of color, but I had a long period where I would mix, like, red and green. I feel like I had to walk through a lot of dirt and mud to get to the brightness.”
When most of us get a package in the mail, it’s the book we ordered from Amazon, or a birthday gift from our parents. When Bec Brittain gets a package, it’s usually full of dead bugs. She orders them in bulk off the internet for a dollar a pop, then chops them into pieces and transforms them into hybrid bug-monsters.