Artistry: Lauren Kaplan
November 9, 2017
Westport-based ceramic artist Lauren Kaplan looks to her South African roots with sculptural works that capture the essence of her homeland.
Text by Allegra Muzillo
You can take Lauren Kaplan out of Africa, but you definitely canât take Africa out of Lauren Kaplan. Drawing from her colorful upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa, Kaplan, who now lives in Westport, hand-molds large- and small-scale decorative vessels composed of stoneware, raku, and porcelain clays, using the African bush and its teeming wildlife as her muses.
In homage to her birthplace, Kaplan often accents her pieces with found objects from natureâtwigs here, fibers thereâand uses several different firing techniques to create vastly dissimilar bodies of work. Kaplanâs sculptural raku pottery closely parallels the texture of an elephantâs skin, her porcelain items take on distinct zebra stripes and cheetah-like markings, her pit-fired vessels look as if theyâve been recovered from an archaeological dig in the Kalahari, and her stoneware sculptures resemble tribal artifacts.
Kaplanâs education and interest in ceramic arts began more than thirty years ago. âI started ceramics just as a hobby and passion,â says Kaplan, who initially learned to make quarter-inch-thick slab pots from a private instructor. âIâd wait for them to dry to a certain degree and then Iâd cut them up and start drawing in corners and doing curves,â she adds.
In 1997, her husbandâs work required the coupleâs move to Zurich, Switzerland. There they remained until 2001, when Laurenceâs job took them to the United States. A home with proximity to both Stamford and New York City was important, and a friend suggested Westport for its rich history as an artistâs colony. Kaplan indeed found a home she loved in the picturesque town, and the family settled in. All was wellâuntil September 11 and the terrorist attack that destroyed New Yorkâs World Trade Center. Thrown for a loop like so many others, Kaplan found herself thinking, âIâm going to have to create in order to get my head out of this funk.â
She enrolled in classes at the prestigious Silver-mine Arts Center in New Canaan, where she was exposed to raku pottery, a type of earthenware produced via the traditional Japanese method of low-temperature firing, followed by removing the piece from the kiln while itâs still red-hot, and then cooling it in open air. âEvery single time a raku piece comes out, Iâm amazed by the result,â says Kaplan. âI refer to raku as perfect imperfectionâand you can never duplicate a piece.â
Her true passion lies in the naked raku process, a derivative of the regular raku practice. Kaplanâs naked raku pieces are hand-molded and fired once, or bisqued, to remove all traces of water. She then applies slipâcolored clay with the consistency of runny cake batterâto the object. The piece is fired to a temperature of roughly 1450° F in a specialized kiln, and removed (with long forceps) while itâs still in a molten state. âWhen you wave it around for a few seconds, any glaze on the object starts to crackle because it cools quicker than the clay,â she explains.
She plunges the hot piece into a vessel filled with sawdust, creating flames and smoke, and closes the vessel tightly. Black soot gets trapped in all the little cracks that were established between the kiln and the sawdust phases, creating unpredictable designs. âAnd thatâs where the element of surprise comes in,â says Kaplan. âWhen you eventually dunk the piece in water, the glaze actually pops off. Itâs -spectacular!â
Kaplanâs work is at once utilitarian and sculptural, simple and complex. And if Africa is her inspiration, the results also have an Asian feel. In fact, the Japanese department store Takashimaya chose to showcase her work alongside Japanese ceramics artists in its window at Bergdorf Goodman. âI couldnât believe that those were my pieces, because they worked so perfectly in an Asian setting,â Kaplan says.
The artistâs multicultural background and attunement to disparate cultures informs her work, but her heart, she has decided, belongs to this country. âSo many people in South Africa ask me, âWhatâs home for you? South Africa or America?â I tell them I love coming back to South Africa for a short time, but I go home to America.â
EDITORâS NOTE: To see more of Lauren Kaplanâs work, visit laurenkaplanceramics.com
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