WAAC Culture Corner: Bringing the Heat for August
Prepared by Diane Lowman, Westport Poet Laureate and WAAC Member
Lauren Gelgor Kaplan. Photo by Jerri Graham PhotographyWelcome back to the Westport Local Press’s Westport Arts Advisory Committee’s “Culture Corner.” Each month, the WAAC scours our 33.45 square miles and highlight one of the many artists – visual, written, performance, and other – who call Westport home. These artists create a spectrum of color that shines over town like the rainbows often seen over the Saugatuck, so we have made “color” our theme.
In August we honor orange, for the heat of summer, and the heat of featured artist’s Lauren Gelgor Kaplan’s kiln. Lauren and her family, natives of South Africa, moved here after living in Switzerland over 20 ago. I have known and admired her and her work for nearly all that time. Her life’s guiding principal, “life is not about give and take, but give and give,” resonates deeply and reflects in everything she does.
Her family arrived in the States a month prior to 9/11, and the event naturally shook her. To relieve that stress and meet new people, she looked for a creative outlet that would tap into her love of architecture and art (both grandfathers were artists). Having pursued ceramics as a hobby for the prior 30 years, she began classes at Silvermine to learn how to “throw on the wheel,” and spent several years there honing her craft.
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A serendipitous transaction with another local artist who created a painting for her entry way brought Westport Magazine to her home to photograph that. There, they noticed her work in her African-inspired living room, and eventually featured her in a cover story. From there, Takashimaya and Bergdorf Goodman both sold her earthy, unique pieces.
The heat features heavily in her method, called Raku. This ancient Japanese technique, meaning “good surprise,” involves removing the piece from the kiln at a temperature of approximately 2,000 degrees, and submerging it in a trash can full of combustibles (newspaper, cardboard, or sawdust) so that the glaze cools more quickly than the clay. This results trademark Raku crackle reveals the black burnt carbon underneath, or as Lauren calls it, “painting with fire.” She delights in the unpredictability of this alchemy between art and science. Because the product of each firing is unpredictable, every single one of her thousands of pieces is unique. She notes that, as in life, there is only so much you can control, but the ceding of that control can produce tremendously gratifying results.
Lauren finds inspiration every day, everywhere in all her surroundings and encounters, and as such her art evolved constantly. While classic potters Hans Coper and Lucie Rie have influenced her, so have artists in her native Capetown. Her current series includes many natural elements such as twigs, twine, and Hawaiian driftwood. Lauren also practices the Japanese method of kintsugi to repair pieces. She loves the “perfect imperfections” implicit in some of her work – they represent embracing and honoring the scars we all earn throughout life.
She works in her home studio five days a week, using protective gear and tongs to extract her work from the kiln, each piece taking between four and six weeks to complete. In the spirit of “give and give,” Lauren has donated many of her pieces to charitable causes, including Pink Aid in support of Breast Cancer patients and survivors. The Brady Collection here in town, and Gallerie 1831 Paris represent her work. We are lucky to have her “hot” art here in our hometown. Please visit her website and Instagram page to see more of her work: LaurenKaplanCeramics.com, or @LaurenGelgorKaplan on Instagram
