A solo exhibition by Eleni Park
14 ceramic works · 2022 – 2026
For fourteen years, the ceramicist Eleni Park has been making vessels by hand in a small studio in Lisbon. The fourteen works in this exhibition — her largest American show to date — were made between 2022 and 2026, almost all of them after her return from a year of apprenticeship at the kiln of Aki Yamamoto in Bizen, Japan.
The exhibition takes its title from a phrase Park has used to describe the moment, sometimes after months of failed firings, when a piece finally emerges from the kiln with the surface she had been imagining the whole time. The phrase is, like much of her work, both modest and exact.
The works are arranged not chronologically but by what Park calls their "register" — the register of light a finished vessel returns from a given angle. The exhibition is best seen, accordingly, in the order the gallery walls present it.
Park makes work the way you remember being told, once, that all work ought to be made: slowly, in private, and toward an idea of the finished thing that no one else can yet see.
The Foundry is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 6pm. Members enter free, every day. Admission is $22 general, $14 students, and free for everyone under 18 and over 70.
The exhibition is best seen with about 40 minutes of time set aside for it. Audio guide is included free with admission and runs 32 minutes; it is also worth turning off and walking the room twice in silence.