At a Los Angeles Gallery, Ceramic Fountains and a Living Room Rendered Entirely in Clay

For those of us who’ve gotten to know our homes and domestic spaces a little too well in the last couple of years, House and Garden, a joint installation of new work by Lily Clark and Analuisa Corrigan at Stroll Garden, offers a chance to refresh the familiar and recontextualize what’s become commonplace and circumscribed. At the Los Angeles gallery, Corrigan has rendered a living room of furnishings in clay – a chair, side tables, mirror, floor lamp, and vase of flowers – while Clark has created a garden of working ceramic fountains staged with live plant vignettes by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. All of it Invites you to pause and give a second thought to what seems ordinary and everyday and then think yet again.

The materiality of clay is crucial to Corrigan, an artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York. Her ceramic process is intuitive but labor intensive, involving sketching and prototyping, then building through a coil technique, before drying and sanding. The resulting figurative forms — warm and friendly even as they’re a little ghostly — can take up to a month to make. Clark, a Los Angeles based artist and designer, is obsessed by a different element: water – its fluidity, and movement, how it interacts with light, and its volume (in both senses of the word, sonic and spatial). Her clean-lined, unglazed ceramic forms contrast with the color and shapes of the incorporated stones which influence the flow and tone of each fountain. The intentional combination of ceramic and stone, she notes, speaks to the way that stone becomes clay, a transformative process that relies on moving water. Lam’s live garden, which accompanies Clark’s fountains and is comprised of plants representative of California’s biodiversity, takes inspiration from Buddhist Zen gardens and Isamu Noguchi’s “California Scenario” landscape.

Bringing the outside in and turning the inside out, this show might just rearrange your sense of space. There’s a temporal element at play, too: in the evenings, you can see Corrigan’s floor lamp illuminated near a glowing TV, and Clark’s fountains highlighted by landscape-style lights, suggesting how interiors and exteriors – both physical and emotional – shift over time. House and Garden is on view through June 11.