About A Friend of The Friend:"Objects made from clay slip from 'art' to 'decorative art' to 'craft' to 'hobby' across class, culture, time, and gender. Clay is establishment, outsider, or somewhere not-quite-either-but-both/and. It is made by the hand and sits at the table of workers and presidents and everyone in between. Its mutable nature has become a language through which I’ve been able to render myself legible to the larger art world as a person from a working-class community.
As a former museum worker, I think of the past as a playground, not a script. Object interpretation, historical reproduction, and public history become tools to suggest a queer utopia of the past in which the present can see itself represented. Many of the techniques, materials, and motifs in my work are influenced by seventeenth and eighteenth century folk arts such as gravestones, sailor tattoos, scrimshaw, ceramic slipware, and sewing samplers. I’ve developed a lexicon of materials including slips, glazes and firing methods to create my work using the wheel. I draw on the iconography of the old New England landscape of my childhood, the folk mythology of the Revolutionary War period, and rediscovering forgotten pottery techniques to create conceptual objects rooted in functional use. My practice is centered in making durable ceramics as a production potter as both a deliberate performance of the craft, and a way to make my work more accessible at scale. Art is for gallery walls and kitchens alike." - Lauren H. Griffin RSVP to the opening here! |
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About Lauren H. Griffin:Lauren H. Griffin is a ceramicist and artist who grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and currently lives and works in Washington D.C. Their upbringing in a family of tradespeople instilled a deep respect for material knowledge. Rooted in early American pottery traditions, their vernacular slipware style explores history, memory, and craft. The foundation of their studio practice is making functional objects for daily living.
Griffin graduated with a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011 with a double major in Ceramics and Art History, Theory and Criticism. Griffin received an M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University in 2016 and spent fifteen years in museums designing programs to further cross-cultural understanding. They currently teach ceramic classes at several community studios as an extension of their making practice. |
