About

Leah Howell received her BFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado in 2005 and her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2019. She currently lives in Eugene, OR and teaches in the art department at UO. Her work has most recently been exhibited at Kesey farm in Pleasant Hill, OR, Coop Gallery in Nashville, TN and Rule Gallery in Marfa, TX.

Contact: leah@leahhowell.com 

Artist Statement

The intersection of the permanent and impermanent, the disposable and the pleasurable opens up a space for my work to live in. I seek to create a tension between the familiarity of objects, materiality and fragmentation.

I work in a speculative practice where the making process drives ideation and discovery. My process is centered around labor, repetition, testing and failure. I use unglazed, colored porcelain to simulate surfaces like rubber, paper, plastic, frosting, textile and thread in order to investigate the slippages of both perceived and real material.

My practice is one that draws on the implicit-value and utility of craft, the material history of ceramics, and ideas of labor-value and production. I am interested in challenging assumptions of use-value by displacing expectations of material and through re-contextualizing familiar objects, tasks and applied decoration.