Lisa River Schenkelberg
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Lisa River Schenkelberg (b. 1979), featured in AQ Volume VI, is a ceramic artist from Cleveland, OH. She studied art and psychology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, where she graduated in 2002 with honors and a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art. After graduation, she remained in Saratoga Springs for a year-long independent study with Leslie Ferst at the Skidmore College ceramics studio before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003. Over the next decade, she continued to hone her craft, and in 2015, she began sharing her work with the public. She is interested in exploring the underlying interconnectivity at the heart of nature, and her work is informed by her various interests in Earth-based spirituality, animism, symbolism, ecology, systems theory, and the restoration of living in harmony with nature.
Lisa’s work has been shown in various group exhibits at galleries across the country, including Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH; Annmarie Sculpture Garden in Solomons, MD; Blue Line Arts in Roseville, CA; Epperson Gallery of Ceramic Arts in Crockett, CA; and The Brea Art Gallery in Orange County, CA. Her work has been featured in various publications, including New Visionary Magazine, Create! Magazine, and The Journal of Australian Ceramics. She has also received recognition through various Juror and People’s Choice awards and was invited to participate in a residency at the Buffalo Creek Art Center in Gardnerville, NV. She is represented by LaFontsee Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. She currently lives and works in Cleveland, OH.
www.lisariverart.com
Could you share the story or concept behind your recent work?
In my most recent work, I am interested in articulating a symbolic representation of the inherent interdependencies that connect all beings in a vast web of complex systems and relationships. My intention is to emphasize the animating energy streaming through all forms of life; the invisible filaments through which spirit manifests into matter. The repetition of certain motifs—such as the spiral, the vulva, fractal-like patterns, root systems, waterways, and mycelial networks—all function to highlight the generative dynamism and interdependent unfolding fundamental to the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
What role does experimentation and exploration play in your artistic practice?
I experience my creative process as an intuitive, multi-sensory, ever-evolving relationship with clay. In much of my work, while I begin with a structure that creates the foundation for the evolution of the form, the end result is not pre-determined. As I build and add clay, each new layer informs the building of the next; subsequent layers are in response to the energy and movement of the previous. It is not my voice alone shaping the clay—the forms that emerge are the co-creative fruition of a dynamic dialogue between me and the elemental material of the Earth.
What message do you hope your art conveys to the world?
My hope is that my art evokes in viewers a visceral felt-sense of our intrinsic interconnectivity. Through experiencing an embodied remembrance of connection to a greater whole, my hope is that viewers are further inspired to reflect upon the possibilities that become available in restoring balance to our relationships with each other and with the Earth.
