Here/Now: Contemporary Narrative and Form in the Yunomi Exhibition Catalog

HERE/NOW
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE
AND FORM IN THE YUNOMI
CRAFT IN AMERICA CENTER

Here/Now: Contemporary Narrative and Form in the Yunomi is a
ceramic cup invitational, which consists of a small group of ceramic artists
asked to construct a series of yunomi, utilitarian cups. The cylinder, being
the root structure of most ceramic objects, leads to the yunomi, which can
be playful and quickly made. The yunomi is a foundational form for most
makers-inviting many options, directions, and intent. These are a range of
contemporary vessel makers who are dedicated to rethinking traditional
ideas. Using the cup as a launching point, this exhibition explores the
historical ideal of the humble, anonymous Japanese potter juxtaposed
with the American idealism of self-experience. Here/Now is guest-curated
by Nikki Lewis and Katie Queen.
This exhibiton took place at the Craft in America Center
in Los Angeles from 7/18/20 - 1/2/21
Support was provided by
the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
Text for the catalog provided by Nikki Lewis and Katie Queen
Edited by Emily Zaiden
Designed by Alex Miller
1

Ashley Bevington
Ashley Bevington’s “Puppy Love” meoto-yunomi seeks to perverse
traditional concepts of craft and marriage. Using the platform of
the meoto-yunomi or “married pair” of cups customarily gifted to
newlyweds in Japanese culture, Bevington’s comically grotesque
forms question who “wears the pants.”
Ashley Bevington
Puppy Love Yunomi Set, 2020
Thrown & altered porcelain, underglaze,
gold & silver luster, cone 6 oxidation
“He has the key to her tomb brain hanging from his red rocket.
Her brain is on his tongue,” Bevington expresses.
4

Bevington uses symbolism as a vehicle to convey ideas:
“the flowers are symbols of little moments of enlightenment,
little pops of light or growth.”
Ashley Bevington
Green & Yellow Poodle Yunomi Set, 2020
Ashley Bevington
Pink & Blue Poodle Yunomi Set, 2020
Color is an important part of Bevington’s visual language.
Brightly colored glazes and stains are utilized to draw
attention to these objects and Bevington often outlines high
relief with jet black, an homage to the 90’s cartoons that
influence her work.
5

Candice Methe
Candice Methe creates works with rich earth tones found in nature as well as
in the historical objects that inspire her forms. Methe has been collecting lichen
for many years, cataloging the deep colors that inherently exist in our world
and using this color palette in her work.
Methe is drawn to artifacts and everyday objects that honor culture, ritual,
and rites. Her lack of “home” or “place” in her mind’s eye is subdued by her
pursuit to create objects that are permanent and will survive long after her own
mortality.
Methe’s meoto pairs are complementary, but create contrast allowing a conversation
between forms. Meoto Pair #1 is curvilinear and organic, voluptuous
and fertile with rich reds creating stature and volume, in contrast to its studded
and grounded ivory counterpart. Methe is commenting on the complexity of
the human condition and our relationships to each other. Like many makers,
Methe transposes the vessel as a proxy for the human body.
6

Candice Methe
Meoto Pair #1, 2020
Ceramic, black stoneware, slips, terra sigillata, glaze, cone 4
Candice Methe
Meoto Pair #2, 2020
Ceramic, black stoneware, slips, terra sigillata, glaze A3
7

Candice Methe
Meoto Pair #3, 2020
Ceramic, black stoneware, slips, terra sigillata, glaze A3
Each meoto pairing hints at the tension of the negative space between each
yunomi, revealing dominance or submission. The placement of the footless,
tilting, ivory yunomi in Meoto Pair #3, whether leaning toward its tripod footed
mate or facing away, brings into being a very different narrative.
Candice Methe
Meoto Pair #5, 2020
Ceramic, black stoneware, slips, terra sigillata, glaze, cone 3
8

Methe consciously adds surface texture to each yunomi giving
us the suggestion of character. In Meoto Pair #4, Methe creates
spikes to imply aggressive characteristics in contrast to its taller
curvaceous mate. She questions gender stereotypes with
ambiguous vessels that have a fluidity transposing masculine and
feminine traits between forms. She wants to create uncertainty in
the viewer, making us question how we conventionally categorize
male and female.
Candice Methe
Meoto Pair #4, 2020
Ceramic, black stoneware, slips,
terra sigillata, glaze A3
Methe’s work shifts like a pendulum between minimal contemporary
excellence and the ancient substrata of vessels from prior millennia.
Each form emulates wisdom and a conjured past life in a bygone
hunter-gatherer culture.
9

Lesley McInally
A native of Glasgow, Scotland, McInally attended the Dundee University
in Dundee, Scotland, a coastal city North of Edinburgh. She received a
Bachelor of Design Honors Degree in Ceramics and Printmaking. In 2004
McInally moved to Cookstown, Canada, a town north of Toronto,
Ontario.
McInally utilizes her expertise in both printmaking and ceramics while
creating her vessels. Her yunomi all have been monoprinted. Her
technique includes applying slips, stains, engobes, and chalks to paper
and then presses that product onto her forms.
Lesley McInally’s Yunomi series has been created in Meoto “siblings” as
she describes them. Conceptually, the work is rooted in a parental
indoctrination of empowerment between mother and child. Each yunomi’s
outer surface is inscribed with a mantra which has been applied using a
monoprinting technique. The image created is reversed once adhered to
the form.
10

Lesley McInally
Stoneware (cone 6)
and hand-colored porcelain engobes
Once forms have been made, her process is to apply colored slip,
engobes, and underglaze, then sand the form. Experimentation
with color and an assortment of mark making creates a pathway
through the surfaces of McInally’s vessels. Her intention is to evoke
memory that becomes frozen or encapsulated in the slip surface
once completed.
Lesley McInally
Stoneware (cone 6)
and hand-colored porcelain engobes
11

Reminiscent of landscapes, the actual texture of the yunomi are left
raw without glaze on the exteriors to enhance the detail of the slip.
A natural hand builder, she also uses the ceramic wheel. Unlike
many ceramic artists who throw and trim their pots on the wheel,
McInally prefers to hand rasp the dry foot of her vessels.
Lesley McInally
Stoneware (cone 6) and
hand-colored porcelain engobes
After firing, the exterior of each piece is dry sanded to reveal more
layers of colored slip covered through the process. This also distresses
the surfaces of the forms. A black stain wash is applied to
the exteriors of the pots and wiped clean to enhance the cracks and
crevices of the vessels where the stain resides. This element creates
a dramatic backdrop to the saturated and vibrant colored slips.
12

Lesley McInally
Stoneware (cone 6) and
hand-colored porcelain engobes
“The Yunomi is considered a cylindrical object used for daily
informal tea drinking. With this in mind, the mother teaches the
child that by holding, turning, and reading the words to themselves
in the mirror they are creating a daily ritual of positive thinking with
the affirmation practice.” Lesley McInally
McInally’s Yunomi theme is rooted in
her “emotional landscape series,” a
larger body of work she is currently
working on. Her work is meant to reflect
the awakening and journey that she has
taken in the last few years in finding
her own path and discovering her own
voice.
13

Jeff Oestreich
Oestreich’s yunomi are the product of a lifetime of exploration and
innovation in ceramic form. As a high school student in Minnesota,
Oestreich attended a Warren MacKenzie and John Reeves workshop
which started him on a trajectory to become one of the most revered
potters of 20th century American Ceramics. He sought out Mackenzie
after this introduction, and originated a life-long friendship that began
with an apprenticeship as a young potter. Oestreich then went on to
apprentice with Bernard Leach at St. Ives pottery in Great Britain.
Inspired by the Glensheen and DuPont Mansion’s craftsman-era green
tiles, as well as the results of hundreds of glaze test tiles, Oestreich
spent years developing surfaces that referenced Arts and Crafts glazes
from the 20s. “I love the look of those glazes and was completely taken
in,” he says. After experimenting successfully with soda firing as an
alternative to salt firings, Oestreich’s work took a new direction into
architectural referenced soda-fired porcelain and stoneware.
Geometry and symmetry are hallmarks of Oestreich’s work. “Napier
Village in New Zealand, and all the Art Deco buildings triggered my
design love from college.” Oestreich compulsively digests visual
information, storing it in a vast mental library then translating this data
into his wheel-constructed forms. He often feels that his life’s work is
answering the question, “How to make a functional pot have depth and
meaning?” Oestreich says, “I’ve targeted the cup as the object to carry
meaning. The technical challenges of trying to tame the wheel have
always intrigued me.”
14

Jeff Oestreich
Yunomi, 2020
Jeff Oestreich
Yunomi with Dodads, 2020
Small understated surface embellishments are also symbols for deeper meaning
and personal investment. Triangles are an important motif in Oestreich work, as
“the triangle patch on a prisoners clothing was used by Nazis as a symbol for
homosexuals; as a gay man I relate to this symbol.” Other simple pictographs
carry great significance to Oestreich, where a series of cups have sprig molded
antidepressant medications or another series of yunomi are impressed with
buttons from his late mother’s button collection. “The quest is how can I bring
more meaning into my yunomi? How can I honor my mom? How can I honor
these memories?”
Jeff Oestreich
Yunomi, 2020
Jeff Oestreich
Yunomi, 2020
15

Liz Pechacek
“My yunomi series is based around formal contrasts like sharp/soft,
silver/gold and straight/round. I like how these juxtapositions on the
similar forms echo the feminine or masculine that is traditional in the
husband/wife style of the Meoto but are less specifically gendered.
It also lets me play with the formal proportions and design elements
that are characteristic to my work.”
-Liz Pechacek
Pechacek respectfully stays within the margins of the traditional yunomi
form, taller in height than in width with a tapered foot. Each cup’s
surface is decorated the same as its pair except for a difference in
direction of the identical motif. Intentionally avoiding gender markers
for each cup, her yunomi pairs are the same size.
Minimal in shape, contemporary in aesthetics, Pechacek’s dots on
dots pair is supremely controlled and ordered, yet light with a
playful surface of dots that shift between foreground and background
creating depth. The compositional shifts between porcelain and dark
earthy brown stoneware slips create contrast.
All Pechacek vessels start with a general dialogue between material,
principles and playful formal ideas.
16

Liz Pechacek
Porcelain Dot Gratiation Yunomi Pair #4, 2020
Porcelain, engobe, glaze dots
Liz Pechacek
Dots on Dots Yunomi Pair #2, 2020
Stoneware, porcelain, with grog, manganese, and glaze dots
Liz Pechacek
Gradated Dots on Stoneware Yunomi Pair #3, 2020
Stoneware, porcelain, engobe, glaze dots
17

Using her pinch/coil technique, Pechacek creates each pair of yunomi
simultaneously, allowing each form to “swell” as she describes it at
the same place and time. This technique creates a bond from one cup
to its mate.
Pechacek uses clay bodies that completely vitrify once fired to
maturity. Surfaces are left raw outside, and exteriors sanded to
her desired smoothness after they are fired.
Liz Pechacek
Shifting Plates Stoneware Yunomi Pair #5, 2020
Stoneware, engobe and sgraffito, wax resist techniques
18
Liz Pechacek
Pink & Green Yunomi Pair #1, 2020
Porcelain, colored engobes, sgraffito, wax resist decoration

Amy Smith
After being educated in strict “form first” rigor at Ohio University,
Smith departed from rigid methods of making to explore the sensuality
of the female figure in her objects. Smith intuitively alters each yunomi
to relate innately to the figure, “cutting a foot” as a method to connect
ankle to knuckle and stretching the clay to suggest “skin over bone.”
Using unctuous white porcelain, Smith incises the figure in fine detail
after carefully studying the topography of the cup to wed the female
body to the form. Smith’s forms swell and stretch suggestively and
figuratively.
For Smith, the “hand-feel” and weight of each yunomi is a deliberate
choice that correlates to human weight and anatomy. Smith uses a
combination of inky black underglaze and fluid glaze that pools and
flows, which references freezing and thawing of water. The method of
making and the discipline of ceramics permeates her studio practice:
“Unloading the kiln is not just unloading the kiln, it’s a reflective,
meditative process.” For Smith, deliberation of form and intent while
investigating the figure creates narrative in her yunomi.
19

Amy Smith
Figurative Yunomi with
Knees Facing Left, 2020
Porcelain with inlay,
cone 10 reduction
Amy Smith
Figurative Cup with
Knees Facing Right, 2020
Porcelain with inlay,
cone 10 reduction
Amy Smith
Figurative Yunomi, 2020
Porcelain with inlay,
cone 10 reduction
Amy Smith
Figurative Cup, 2020
Porcelain with inlay,
cone 10 reduction
20

Kevin Snipes
Kevin Snipes’ Yunomi are formally presented as individual cups, but within
each form there is a duality between characters. Each panel represents the
experience of a different person within the same story emphasizing otherness.
The work is meant to create a performance or poetic space with characters
and imagery that could be described as Magic Realism and derived from
Snipes’ memories, experiences, and ideas. Snipes’ vessels are hand-built with
slabs. He intentionally makes paneled sides of the vessels creating a
polyptych of sorts that are lifted with feet elevating the forms. Snipes carves
into the leather-hard surface of the clay, “tattooing” it like skin with dreamlike,
surreal imagery. While the work is still green, he applies colorful underglazes
and black oxide layering them with mishima and sgraffito techniques with his
scenarios.
There is an ambiguity of gender and ethnicity to the figures on the vessels, as he
leaves the interior flesh of the characters the color of the porcelain he used to
make the work. This allows a fluid exchange of authorship of narrative between
Snipes and the viewer. Snipes is interested in many ideas surrounding otherness
that encompass history, colonialism and patriarchy. Snipes ponders the possibility
of history being reversed. What if African descendants were the colonists who
conquered the world and described themselves as golden rather than black?
21

Snipes thinks of his ceramic work as notes or quick sketches, dreamlike, childhood
wonderment rooted in what comes after Post-postmodernism that perhaps falls
under the genre of Transmodernism, but otherness refrains him from identifying
with any specific genre of art.
A self-described “trans-medium creative,” Snipes makes work with many media,
again emphasizing otherness and his place at the fringe of potter/painter,
oscillating between the two. Snipes is influenced by the works and ideas of Rudy
Autio, Akio Takamori, Jean-Michael Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and author
Jacque Lacan.
Formally, the yunomi align with his conceptual desire for the user/viewer to hold
or cradle the cups in their hands. He does not like to use handles because they create
a degree of separation from the cradled embrace he desires.
Kevin Snipes
Mask 1, 2020
Porcelain, glaze, underglaze, oxide wash
Kevin Snipes
Mask 2, 2020
Porcelain, glaze, underglaze, oxide wash
Snipes has moved from residency to residency working within different artist
communities over the years. Most recently, Kevin made the conscious decision to
abandon the rural clay communities of Montana and North Carolina to settle into
a more urban space. Currently, he is a resident artist at the Philadelphia Clay
Studio. Snipes’ subject matter has always been entrenched in race. The protests
of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement have awakened more members of our
society. Snipes feels that the imagery in his work that has been dismissed and overlooked
before, will become more overt, direct, and accepted.
22

Snipes adds “protrusions” as he calls them to the exteriors of his work. The
protrusions are made as awkward attachments, reminiscent of ear-like forms on
either side of the squared vessel. The square symbolizes a white man’s
environment and the protrusions represent a black person in a room full of white
people. The protrusions also represent the oddball/queer person in a room full
of cisgendered, heterosexual people. As of late, the protrusions have become
outgrowths of figures in one panel encroaching into the bordering composition.
Kevin Snipes
Karate Chop, 2020
Porcelain, glaze, underglaze, oxide wash
Kevin Snipes
Skater, 2020
Porcelain, glaze, underglaze, oxide wash
“As an artist who has trained in color theory and understands the social and
psychological impact that color can have, I would like to remark: the construction
of a “white peoples” was and remains political. The term white is not an
accurate representation. The term was widely used by elitist Eurocentric colonialists,
whose intention was to create a hierarchy over those people they enslaved.
They were fully aware of Christian symbolism that equates whiteness with purity,
holiness, and closeness to godliness. But unless your name is Casper the Ghost,
you are not white. Brown skinned people have been forced to embrace the term
black as an oppositional force against white supremacy. Part of the Black Lives
Matter movement is dismantling the illusion of whiteness. Bring your skin tone
back down to earth. Reckon with your privilege.” -Kevin Snipes
23

Shoko Teruyama
Shoko Teruyama grew up in Mishima, Shizouka Prefecture, roughly 60 miles
southwest of Tokyo. Japanese animal myths and folklore influence Teruyama’s
ceramic work, but she abstracts direct correlations between her imagery and
cultural tales. “These stories were ingrained in me as a kid, even in school we
would go to shrines and I would see them (animals). I use animals in my work
because they are much easier to use to tell the stories…all the Japanese stories
I want to tell.” Teruyama’s animals are often deliberately quiet, having no
mouths and presenting themselves as conduits for interpretation.
Teruyama uses sgraffito to heavily incise into a red earthenware clay body,
and layering gem colored glazes to punctuate carved ornamentation.
Approaching the concept of a contemporay yunomi gave Teruyama the
opportunity to “work-in” personal experience and meaning: “2 pairs in one
set becomes a forum to talk about something” and the yunomi format gives the
ability for the viewer to “turn the cup sideways, upside down, with no handle…
there are many perspectives, so you can use this forum as a way to shift
meaning, shift the world you believe in.”
The inverted creatures represent loosely mirrored worlds gone topsy-turvy;
one world is upright and on a straight path while the other is representative of
“how things can be darker, shadowed, your feet are taken away and you’re
flipping upside down.” Teruyama also sees the quirky animals as points of
humor in her work, a reminder that life goes on.
24

Shoko Teruyama
Untitled or 6 Cups (3 sets of 2), 2020
Hand built earthenware with sgraffito decoration
25