Lesley Bevan is an artist and voice over actor currently living in Chicago, IL. She received a BS in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and enjoyed a career in theatre, TV and film, regionally and internationally, for over 20 years. She took her first pottery class in 1999, while a resident actor at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. For years she chased two passions, clay by day and theatre by night, sometimes smuggling work into her dressing room to slip-trail pots during intermission. She clearly remembers the matinee when she found herself onstage performing Lady MacBeth’s “Out Damned Spot” speech in front of an audience of 500 people while simultaneously working out the design for a new mug in her head. It was a moment of clarity. By 2015, she had committed to a full time career in clay. Today, Lesley is a studio artist at Lillstreet Art Center, where she creates her own work and fires the soda kiln for a robust soda firing program.
I come to ceramics through the lens of a long career in theatre. It’s an actor’s best kept secret that everything she interacts with on stage informs her character and helps her tell the story. A heavy, flat-bottomed stein might ground her and put her in mind of a rowdy Shakespearean pub. The refined delicacy of a porcelain teacup helps to straighten her spine and transport her to Edwardian England. Through considerations of weight and surface and a nod to traditional patterns from around the world, I try to build these same transportive qualities into my work. My goal is to create beautiful, everyday objects with a story to tell, and the power to transport the beholder.
The ornate designs which characterize my work are made by slip-trailing—the process of piping liquid clay onto the surface of a vessel, much like decorating a cake. Each piece is painstakingly piped freehand, resulting in raised patterns into which I lay a second, third or fourth glaze. My desire is to create sensorial surfaces and flowing lines which perfectly express my love of Art Nouveau, Arabesque motifs, Asian textiles and the repetitive geometry found in nature. I used to be frustrated when my delicate, free hand designs were obscured or obliterated in the soda kiln, but I’ve come to embrace the chaos of soda as the last layer of the story. I hope that my work transports the beholder in some small way, engaging their curiosity and inviting them to wonder, “What’s the story…what happened here?”