FOG Design+Art 2024, San Francisco
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Booth 117

SCROLL DOWN FOR PREVIEW OF WORKS ON VIEW

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new work by Michaela Yearwood-Dan – the artist's first-ever dedicated ceramics presentation, following several examples of individual ceramic works augmenting bodies of work that focused on her painting practice. 

Describing her practice, Yearwood-Dan says: "I make large-scale paintings and ceramics that primarily explore the self, love, queerness, Blackness, and other themes as a means of self historicising.” While the artist is perhaps best known for her lush, abstract paintings, she works with equal fluency in clay, often incorporating elements of her singular visual language—swirling, gestural brushstrokes; botanical motifs; and handwritten, diaristic meditations—into her ceramic works.

Yearwood-Dan began working with clay in 2020, hand-making pots in her London flat during Covid-19 lockdown. The vessels, vases, and planters are defined, in part, by their insistent handmadeness. While imbuing the work with her own visual vocabulary, she draws upon the rich pottery traditions of the Caribbean; Japan; West Africa; and First Nations, engaging with methods of making that are often relegated to the status of craft and the realm of the feminine.

Said the artist: “I am quite excited to present ceramics in a standalone context for the first time. I've been thinking about the forms of these works, looking a lot at the female body and traditional ceramic vessel forms such as vases and pots. Thus far I have only exhibited ceramics alongside (and created as an extension of) domesticity-alluding paintings. But in this presentation, for the first time, these ceramic explorations get the opportunity to be viewed on their own, offering me the chance as an artist to be seen beyond painting, into an adjacent design-oriented and sculptural space.”

More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. A Dropbox of high-res image files is linked above; image reuse must be in accordance with the credit lines contained in each file title.