lauryn axelrod
West Pawlet, Vermont, USA
Lauryn Axelrod in her studio, West Pawlet, Vermont, USA
Lauryn Axelrod, Shattered, 2019. Porcelain, wood-fired. 6.5” H x 7” W x 9” L
Lauryn Axelrod, Chawan, 2018. Porcelain/stoneware, woodfired, 3” H x 5” W
I spent most of the first two months of the Pandemic away from my studio, in a Houston hospital, caring for my elderly father and helplessly watching the global disaster unfold through the shell-shocked faces of harried doctors and nurses.
I was desperate to return to the studio, to make sense of this new world through art. But with no chance to put my hands in clay, I turned to my first love: poetry. Week after week, I sat in hospital rooms listening to life-saving machines whir and hum, writing an epic poem, stanza after painstaking stanza, seeking out language and image to express my evolving experience of Lockdown.
When I returned home, I walked into my deeply-missed studio...and walked out.
Pre-Pandemic, my work was focused on wood-fired ceramics for high-end Japanese restaurants and practitioners of chanoyu, the Japanese Tea Ceremony—all of which (including wood-firing) are fundamentally about community, shared experience, and presence. These seem so vital in the current times, yet are impossible now...and for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, those kinds of ceramics seemed superfluous, even insulting, when so many people were struggling just to put any food on the table.
My recent sculpture work explored the things we shed, or leave behind, as well as isolation and community, which seemed even more relevant. So, did my community-based work, The Shard Project, which chronicles how and why our world has fallen apart through handmade ceramic shards. In a world turned upside down—when everything appeared ephemeral, broken, shifting—I wanted to make something that remained, that explained what was happening. But I didn’t know what that was.
In between continuing work on The Shard Project and finishing two sculptures fired previously, I tended my vegetable garden, preserved food, and baked bread. I also started exploring other materials that seemed to reflect the profound feelings of fragility and impermanence, destruction, grief, and doubt. Broken wood, sticks, torn paper, words and drawings scribbled on a piece of slate in chalk became small practices, sketches, visual poems, evolving day by day, searching for meaning and metaphor, looking for what remains when we re-emerge.
Lauryn Axelrod, Tokkuri Trio, 2018. Porcelain, woodfired. Each 5” H x 2” W
During the Lockdown, Lauryn Axelrod paused making wood-fired ceramics, and continued work on THE SHARD PROJECT, exploring material and metaphor through poetry, paper, wood, chalk, broken slate, pottery shards, and glass.
Lauryn Axelrod, from The Shard Project, 2020.
Lauryn Axelrod, Passing Clouds, 2020. Bark, paint. 32” L x 20” H x 2” D
Lauryn Axelrod, Social Distance, 2020. Stoneware, wood-fired. 7” H x 4” W x 12” L
Lauryn Axelrod, Dragon Tea Scoop and Pick, 2020. Wood bark, stick, and stone. 1” H x 5” W x 12” L
Lauryn Axelrod, The Shard Project, 2020. Stoneware, electric fired. 2” H x 2” W x 1/4” D