A curated art series by Understudy
Featured Artist Liz Quan
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 May 17, 2022 The Oxford Hotel
Liz Quan is a ceramicist and designer based in Boulder, Colorado, known for her organic porcelain slip forms and vessels with a deeply refined but playful, engaging sensibility. After an accomplished career as an art director in New York, Liz began to explore ceramics as a way to return to working with her hands. In 2005, she began post-baccalaureate study in ceramics at the University of Colorado and has since exhibited at Walker Fine Art, the Arvada Center, McNichols Civic Center Building, and more. Liz works in porcelain for its pure aesthetic, exploring its fragile qualities and innate characteristics; by appreciating its boundaries, she explores deeply within them. Discover more of Liz’s work.
Liz Quan’s organic, sensual life forms invite you to touch them and reward you with a journey of play, meditation, and discovery. Intimate in scale, they rest in the spaces between pattern and randomness, growth and stillness, fragility and strength. These elemental forms create a sense of contemplation and memory through movement, sound, color, and grace. Like shells, stones, or prayer beads, they engage all the senses and touch something fundamental within us.
Made from porcelain slip, each individual form has a polished, smooth texture that’s deeply satisfying and impressionable. Linked together, the multiples convey connection and fertility. In working with porcelain, she pushes its boundaries and innate characteristics to explore and create an engaging experience. A sense of play is at the heart of these pieces; for both the artist and the viewer, there’s a delight and a sense of unlimited possibilities within them.
Visually contemporary and refined, the work is also the artist’s response to a world where technology, uniformity, and the pace of information can be overwhelming. Liz’s aesthetic offers replenishment, beauty, and subtlety, allowing viewers to find space and clarity in the forms and a path to return to their own nature.