Ceramic artist Lily Fein layers and presses coils into vessels, pinching and massaging porcelain and paper clay, and then stippling and carving into their surfaces. In any art form, that tactility is a stamp of identity. Because vessels are so like us, with insides and outsides, in Lily’s work that mark-making can read like a self-portrait, or more accurately, a deep, intricate trace of existence: I am here. This was me at this moment of making, this was the clay opening new pathways of knowing in me.
Indeed, she’s created a pattern, lily dots, to stand in for herself in her work. It appears in paintings alongside the vessels in Night Blooms, Lily’s exhibition at Lucy Lacoste Gallery through July 11.
For Night Blooms, Lily expands from her own direct touch to include and echo that of Moshe Srebro, her grandfather’s cousin, who once drew a map of Pultusk, Poland, the family’s hometown.
It’s easy to think of maps as fixed, but populations and those in power rewrite them as easily as Lily scratches onto wet clay. Astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, the prodigious mapmaker of the 2nd century AD, was an early pioneer of cartography. He drafted astrological natal charts, which placed his subject’s birth town at the center of not only a world map, but a map of the heavens. Moshe’s map of Pultusk is a bit like that for Lily.
She riffs and plays with his rendering like a fellow musician in a jazz quintet building on and answering his improvisation. This is how art differs from science, or at least pre-quantum science. The artist sees a map of Pultusk and she appreciates the touch of the hand that drew it. Perhaps she sees Moshe’s inked description of the town and imagines her way into it, but that process is a felt one, not measurable, and populated by ghosts, stories, and emotional resonances as liquid and life-giving as the river circling the town. This trace of her past is a place for her to start,
And so she puts her stamp on it, nodding to Moshe, crafting something with an inside and outside the rest of us can use to navigate our own passages through time and memory.
Lily writes:
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