Celebrating those who share their creative hands, heart, and head to bring us a bit more joy.

Ellen Levenhagen:

 Artist Statement

I began my career as a studio potter in Chicago doing art fairs. Soon my husband and I moved to a farm in Wisconsin. Moving from the city to the country was a revelation. Inspired by nature, gardening, and the wildflowers blooming in our woods, suddenly all my pots had flower motifs. I was also inspired by Betty Woodman’s pottery and the Italian Majolica style of using a white based glaze on Earthenware clay with the expressive use of colors brushed on functional pottery.  This technique drove me to years of learning how to manage the complexities of decorative pottery. But then other opportunities led us into careers teaching in international schools and my pottery took on other inspirations. Decorative motifs found throughout Asia such as batik patterns, Japanese prints, and Chinese scrolls inspired new ideas. Now back in Wisconsin, my husband and I own a pottery studio and gallery in Algoma. I give lots of pottery classes and try to balance inspiring others to make pots while developing my own ceramic works. I hope the visual connections to nature and culture enhance the simple function of pottery. 

I was inspired by nature, gardening, and the wildflowers blooming in our woods. Suddenly all my pots had flower motifs. 

MARK KOLINSKI 

Artist Statement

For Mark, clay exerts both fascination and challenge. He is captured by clay’s accessibility, sensuousness, and its technical and conceptual possibilities. Throughout the making process, clay requires the artist to attend closely, a kind of deep reading, to its fragile temperament. As a ceramicist, Mark works with a particular sensitivity to the visual interplay between surface, decoration, and three-dimensional form. 

 While some of Mark’s pieces work as vases, his work is generally non-functional and directed towards formal sculptural concerns: line, form, texture, color, shifting geometric planes, negative space, illusion, balance, and pattern, and juxtaposition. 

. The addition of figurative and decorative elements appeared as a result of years of travel and living abroad where the richness of Persian carpet design, the suppressed schematic imagery of ancient Egyptian art, Asian textile and fretwork patterns, textile designs created in the Wien Werkstatte during the Secessionist period, and object obscura collected and displayed in glass case vitrines by Austria’s 19th century aristocracy, found their way into his work. These decorative elements are co-opted, distilled, and applied to ambiguous narratives and landscapes. 

Sketching is a fundamental first step to Mark’s process. Dance, yoga, or athletics, movements that require extreme physicality are translated into figurative forms. Negative space is emphasized by decorative patterns. These spaces extend and expand the form while adding dynamic tension. These decorative details suggest draped fabric wrapped like a sarong around the figure and may be mirrored on the form’s face. The figures, often contorted yet graceful, are somewhat flattened and frontal. In silhouette, they  reference a kind of calligraphy. The surfaces are suppressed and dark. The darkness focuses attention to the form but also acts like black ink applied on paper with a sumi brush. 

Mark hopes to engage the viewer by slowly revealing layered juxtapositions: grace/contortion, positive/negative, minimal/ornamental, organic/geometric, volume/flatness, eros/logos. 

About Mark and Ellen

Ellen and Mark have been had their hands in clay for over 40 years. After graduating from Southern Illinois University where they studied ceramics with Harris Deller, they moved to Chicago and worked four years as studio assistants to Ruth Duckworth. Moving to Wisconsin in 1985, they began to show their work in Edgewood Gallery and traveled around the Midwest doing art fairs. In 1992, Mark and Ellen began their overseas life, spending 28 years teaching in international schools in Kuwait, Malaysia, Japan, China, Singapore, and Austria. They immersed themselves in the culture of each location, mining the rich visual language on offer and incorporating that language into their work.  Both have shown their work at various galleries in the Midwest and are now owners of Clay on Steele, a ceramic studio and gallery in Algoma, WI. They balance their studio time with teaching classes and filling their passions by making pottery and ceramic arts. 

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