Forest Park
Host: Nancy Gardner in the backyard of her home & studio
Nancy is an award winning potter with an extensive exhibition record with work published in several ceramics collections. Her husband Burt is a sculptor and college art professor. They have been collaborating on their pottery since 1988.
Jenny Mendes’ work is intimate in scale, with the energy of a reverent mysterious prayer - a meditation on wholeness, the cosmos, cycles of life and death, the tangible/intangibility of human connection and peace. Her process is to tease out and play with a story or image that arises during the arch of time spent with each piece, trusting the alchemy of intuition and material.
Forming function, a dance, often a tug of war, between though and object making. Add to this dialogue the sheer joy of working with clays as materially responsive as porcelain and surfaces only possible through glaze fusion. A dynamic is created which becomes a life-long fascination.
Roberta’s thrown, altered, carved and gestural pieces are intimate forms that fit and feel good in my hand. While they are generally not representations of actual objects, they reflect the shapes, patterns, colors and surfaces that she is drawn to in nature that inform and inspire her work. She lives Oak Park, Illinois where she herds two cats, keeps up her old house and her overgrown garden.
Levi Yastrow is a potter and teacher from the Chicago Suburbs. He makes functional soda and wood fired tableware inspired by his kinetic connection to clay and the world around him. Levi is a teaching artist at Lillstreet in Chicago and it the Art Studios Lab Technician at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
Qi Zhang’s work bridges the digital and the handmade, blending functional and sculptural ceramics through slip casting techniques. He designs each form digitally, 3D print prototypes, and creates plaster molds to cast my pieces. His work draws inspiration from the structural beauty of architecture, the organic complexity of nature, and the dreamlike qualities of surrealism. Each piece is an exploration of form and feeling—intended to evoke both familiarity and otherworldliness.