Hillary Kane
Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 2nd 4 - 7 pm
Remarks at 5:30 pm
Lucy Lacoste Gallery is pleased to announce our new exhibition MARROW, with Hillary Kane, opening November 2, 2024. This is Kane’s second solo show at the gallery. Her first solo, UNEARTHED: Relics of Memory, was a great success and MARROW brings us a beautiful new evolution of Kane’s rich, authentic style. The show consists of a range of wood-fired sculptures, mainly made in Bali, Indonesia, with the exception of some built and fired in Massachusetts. Also included are several paper-clay on canvas, oil paintings. MARROW plays with juxtaposing ideas of objects holding massive weight and heft that can balance on a precarious point, daring the viewer to question where it stands.
Kane’s sculpture is not only about form, but soul. She has traveled the world and immersed herself in many cultures, which informs her work in a unique and personal way. The work of MARROW digs into the essence of Kane’s artistic being. The work teeters on the edge of exploration of form, and thoughts of actual anatomy. The work also literally has the appearance of teetering on balancing points centered to wood bases made from reclaimed wood, that Kane charred herself. Kane begins her process by making small scale forms and uses these as roadmaps to create the final, large-scale sculpture. Along with her paper-clay, oil paintings, the show features functional ware such as chawan (teabowl), tokkuri (sake bottle) and containers.
Extremely fond of the sustainable, rudimentary approach to the wood firing process, Kane effortlessly blends form and surface with thoughtful meaning. The striking look of her sculpture is achieved by hand-orchestrating bold texture before firing, in harmony with the natural result of the wood firing process - a surface built up with layers of ash. Kane embraces the aesthetic draw to atmospheric firing and enjoys thelack of control over the fierce and powerful process.
Kane, originally from Concord, Massachusetts, studied painting and printmaking in undergrad. Her world-travels have deeply informed her artwork, and she was first drawn to clay as a medium during her time as part of the Peace Corp in Cameroon, where she focused on Agroforestry and was physically working with red clay soil. Upon her return to the states and an artist-stay at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, she was introduced to the wood-firing process and immediately felt her calling to that lifestyle.
In 2010 she co-founded Gaia Ceramic Arts Center in Ubud, Bali and has since been directing and developing there, continuing with making her own art while raising twin daughters. Kane ultimately splits her year between her hometown of Concord and Bali, Indonesia.
SHOW STATEMENT:
M A R R O W : a daring look within
These works represent a continual unearthing of emotions bound up in form, a noetic archaeology where a fragment, a pure abstraction, can be transliterated into a mass or a memory, vaguely corporeal.The pieces present visual dualities that ask, Are we looking near or far? Is this anatomy or geology? Talisman or specimen?They ask for discernment in place of answer.
This excavation, ever deeper, revels in the essence of tipping point: the imminent possibility of crumble—or of lift off; of return—or of departure—the axial limen of the unknown.The sculptures evolve from miniature studies into exaggerated expansions of tiny parts of a whole, yet they are each whole: embodiments of the small universe and the great order-- As above, So below.
Born of fire, they are bodies and bone, they are skin, they are the accumulated layer upon layer of our sentient existence with every dusting and fluxing of wood ash, with every sheaf of wax or color or oxide powder embedded there within. From the crucible of their creation, they ask of us what it means to hold and behold, to contain and to carry, to scratch and dig and claw to the marrow, to balance and even to levitate—in spite of, in the face of—everything we know.