Ani Kasten
Lucy Lacoste gallery is delighted to present Ani Kasten - ADRIFT, a solo exhibition focusing on large scale ceramic sculpture often incorporating found wood and metal, August 10 – 31, 2024. Kasten, a rising star in the ceramic art scene has been showing with Lucy Lacoste since 2008. This is her 6th solo at the Gallery, which the artist views as the culmination of her career.
Ani Kasten, b. 1976, was introduced to clay by the British minimalist potter Rupert Spira with whom she apprenticed. Following this life altering experience, she went to Thime, Nepal, on a government grant to revive the town’s pottery business which set in motion her use of unorthodox processes and materials. Upon her return to the United States, she realized that studying art in an academic setting would be too restrictive.
A rule breaker in art and craftsmanship, she set up her first studio in California and began working in the way she still does to this day, combining stoneware and porcelain clays, embracing the cracks that developed as a result and stitching the pieces back together with wire. Kasten considers the results of breaking apart and coming back together a metaphor for life. Not hesitating to combine dirt and debris with black clay she has forged her own unique ceramic style. After California Kasten moved to Maryland, ultimately buying a derelict building and turning it into a studio. She now lives in Shafer, Minnesota, where she has a new studio and home, and finds her driftwood on Lake Superior.
Kasten’s desire is to use sculpture and form to communicate ideas words cannot. Morning Web, an extremely large ceramic sculpture containing wire as well as driftwood. Here she captures the marvel of seeing dew strung on a spider web between shrubs and prairie grass first thing in the morning, while at the same time being overwhelmed by unsettling current events. Concerns about the environment are present in her psyche, perhaps even more so as she sees nature as a spiritual thread in life.
Born on the island of Nantucket, the ocean as a natural force has always been important to Kasten. In the sculpture Whale, the artist attempts to “make sense of this broken world we live in by sifting through life experiences that make up our foundation.” The artist portrays the whale as an idyllic, wild archetypal form that has “endured much suffering at the hands of humankind yet holds greater wisdom than we can fathom.”
Taking Off is about gesture. While sourcing her materials, Kasten writes she was “struck by the pieces of wood that seemed to be movement or gesture frozen in time.” Kasten sees the gestures in the wood, which she then translates to her sculptures final form. Kasten says, “This piece holds the energy of a shore bird taking flight.”
Local materials have always added to the materiality of clay for Kasten. Wood is frequently the starting point for her sculpture and central to her work. Kasten has said that if she were not a clay artist, her medium would be wood. She often starts with the piece of driftwood which gives her the inspiration for the sculpture, as in the case of Whale and Taking Off. Kasten appreciates the dichotomy of wood and clay. Wood always retains evidence of its experience in the concentric circles it contains; whereas clay is soulful and plastic to begin with, then when fired becomes static.
The rich surfaces in Kasten’s work are achieved largely before firing, by layering different kinds of clays, glazes, and slips. The revealing layers expose what is underneath and celebrate the innate colors and textures coming from the combination of material. Kasten layers the slips and glazes in an attempt to highlight their expressive nature. The striations and carved patterns seen throughout her new sculpture and vessels, have always been a thread in Kasten’s work, which she believes stem from her upbringing by her father who is a hand weaver. She states, “I use the patterns that were imprinted in my unconscious.”
Ani Kasten takes an idea an distills it into form, often expressing thoughts in depth that words cannot. She sees connection in objects that are broken. The passage of time and texture are important to her work. Nature is a common inspiration in her work and the wellspring of her soul. Above all she is a rule breaker, an artist speaking her truth her own way. Seeing the world with all its challenges she remains an optimist seeking the thread of beauty within debris.
She is now showing in the top tier of galleries in New York and LA and just received the prestigious McKnight Fellowship award which comes with a $25,000 unrestricted stipend.
“Ani Kasten is an artist who has always thought big. Her ceramic sculpture speaks powerfully to me on a soul level. It is my great pleasure not only to represent Ani, but to count her as a close friend.” – Lucy Lacoste, 2024
ARTIST STATEMENT
The language of ceramic materials allows me to express through form my thoughts and observations of human emotions and experiences that can’t be expressed with words. Clay begins as plastic and mutable and then contradicts itself with the forceful permanence of its fired form. It is soft and can be crafted and shaped, yet somehow eludes ultimate control by its transmutation during firing. This body of work is an exploration and manipulation of this essential state of the materials, wherein disparate clay and glaze materials, along with metal and driftwood collected from the shores of Lake Superior are combined in unique ways. My approach shifts between wheel-throwing and hand- building, using stoneware and porcelain, stitching pieces together with metal wire, adding inclusions of rock and driftwood, fired shards and bits of spent kiln coils. My pieces are a conversation between the clay and the inclusions and fragments I introduce—do they reject one another, or fuse gracefully, or learn to live side by side. I am captivated by the beautiful disharmony in the materials, the evolving relationships of strife or harmony, fusing into a tenuous balance during firing and assemblage. My sculptures and vessels are intended as manifestations in object form of our actions and interactions as social beings: we form relationships, build and construct the world around us, even with the awareness that natural processes and the passage of time will shift, change and impact our work in unpredictable ways. These pieces are about building and creating harmony in form from the visible landscape of unavoidable brokenness. They are built from wreckage and fragments, assemblages of broken shards of ceramic, spent kiln coils, and washed-up sections of driftwood that are evidence of lived experience. These sculptures manifest the drifting through experience, the effect that lived experience has on our corporeal existence. They fuse the refined within the rough, reveal the beauty in ugliness, embody fragility while exhibiting inner strength, taking on the contradictions and play of forces we find in ourselves as we grapple with emotions, face and resolve conflicts, and seek harmony in our existence. We try to heal, and make whole broken things from our pasts, and these forms are a vocabulary to express what words cannot.