Since becoming a mother in 2018, Lyon has pursued a powerful new direction in her work a return, in sculpture, to the primacy of the human figure, but with a child - and a new self - as the muse.Īnd at the heart of it all is clay its physicality, its evocative depths.
Between 20, the artist’s investigations probed the complexity of the emotional security on offer in the home, particularly through the histories layered in objects of comfort. Lyon’s sculptures are at once atemporal representations of everyday items and uncanny beings which seize at lived reality through a storytelling of the textured and the idiosyncratic. We are met with detailed replicas of objects traditionally soft in nature and possessed of intense tactile and nostalgic energies. Shaping these ceramic works are an obsession with prescription and an intricately constructed theory of the real. Sparked by the folly of a child’s first birthday party, this piece at the entrance of the gallery sets the scene for the deeply personal and yet sharply universal explorations which fill the space with this artist’s unstoppable ambition. To wit: a sculpted hand holds - catches - a layer cake in the moment of its collapse. Motherhood, these pieces remind us, rarely matches up to expectations, whether those expectations are internalized or exposed from without, by society and all its norms. She considers the “simultaneity of the mother's experience, at once breathtaking, beautiful, confusing, and grueling.” These are words and pieces which embody Alexandra Sacks’ term “matrescense”, the birth of a mother, the profound transition comparable to that experienced in the time of adolescence at once the body and the mind are assailed by contradictory emotions, ambivalent perspectives. Lyon’s newest work seeks to mine the incredibly rich and complex territory of the changes - to the physical and physiological body - inherent in the process of becoming a mother. A mashup of sex, body, and baby, the naked weight and labor of young motherhood’s emotional and physical intensity is laid bare. These are works in a complicated relationship with sentimentality enlarged domestic objects and cropped body sections reference support and transformation, while swollen breasts - presented as a bench - an enlarged leg - become a tree trunk- and ropes propped in an unspecified readiness elude easy meaning.
Inhabiting a Kunsthalle-like space on the Hudson River, Lyon’s show celebrates a lusciousness of flesh and intimacy, visualized through the ever-changing maternal body. Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present “Tender Temper”, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Ashley Lyon.