Bio

Lisa Reardon ( she/her. b. 1980, Cape Town, South Africa)

I began my career as a fashion buyer. I’ve always had a love of form that feels organic and wild and makes you rethink femininity. My life changed the day I accepted an invitation to a clay class. I fell in love. I realized quickly that I wanted to build a career around working with clay. Fast forward a few years, two kids and a move across continents...I now sustain a regular practice of experimenting with clay from my home studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. While I show my work in galleries and delight in selling my work to interested buyers, my most beloved fans and critics will always be my daughters- Zoe & Ella.

Artists statement 

My studio is the place where time falls away and I can both escape my domesticated life and process it. My work speaks to the raw, untamed and sometimes chaotic energy that emerges when my responsibilities and expectations are suspended. I work on the clay. I fight with it. I explore and find calm. It’s catharsis. 

I make intuitively. I usually have six or more sculptures going on at once, jumping between them to stay loose and impulsive. I start my process by hand building clay. I work quickly to keep immediacy in my work, often firing too early, before the work is dry, encouraging cracks and spontaneity in the kiln. Once the work is fired, I start repeated rounds of breaking the work, rearranging, reattaching, and glazing. I’m not afraid to take a hammer to a piece. I trust the shapes will begin to emerge directly from my deconstruction and reassembly. Glaze often becomes form and clay becomes surface.

My sculptures rely heavily on experimentation and playful discovery. I grow and shrink them. I love and hate them. They’re always changing because in my eyes they are rarely ever ready to be finished. Like a relationship I won’t let go of, I try to influence them and improve them. But clay allows me the freedom to push so far until the relationship is teetering on the edge of either greatness or destruction. Some build up and are beautiful. Some are a bit weird or chaotic. Some just fall apart. But they’re always honest and free to inhabit whatever wild form they want to become. 

Maybe that’s why my pieces tend to feel organic, feminine, of the Earth. There’s an organized messiness to it, just like nature. I try to embrace overgrown wildness of shape and texture and balance it with smooth surfaces that give the eye some relief from the intensity of the untamed. You may see flowers, bones, even genitalia. I encourage you to see whatever you like in my work, letting surprise and playful discovery guide you.