Meet the Maker: Re Jin Lee
Growing up, Re Jin Lee thought she’d be a fashion designer. Born and raised in São Paolo, Brazil to South Korean parents, Lee earned her B.A. in fashion design at Faculdade Santa Marcelina (FASM) before moving to the U.S. to pursue her dream of working in the fashion industry. But, it was a stint as a stylist in Los Angeles and New York that left her disillusioned. “I didn’t find that I had the same passion that my peers had,” she recalls.
So she decided to pivot. Lee had always loved drawing — a skill that her mother, who was also an artist, encouraged — and though she’d never imagined it could be a career, she decided to give it another try. She began by drawing on small objects that had a functional use, things like tableware. “I wanted to share my drawings in a way that was useful,” she says. Once she’d accumulated a number of these functional items — mostly collected secondhand — and embellished them with her own drawings and screen printings, she opened an online Etsy store, and the orders quickly came in.
Bolstered by the positive response, Lee decided to begin creating her own surfaces on which to draw. She remembers her first ceramics class “was not love at first sight.” It was a wheel-throwing class “and even though I enjoyed it, I didn’t feel that click,” she says. Things did click, however, once she took a class focused on hand-building, an ancient method that allows the ceramicist to create forms without the use of a pottery wheel. “It was instant passion,” Lee says. “I didn’t know it was something I wanted to do. It found me.” So began an unexpected career as a sculpture artist.
These days, Lee hand-builds each of her singular ceramic art sculptures — some have functional uses (like candle holders and vases) and some are designed purely for aesthetic appreciation. She favors two techniques: coil building and slab building. The latter involves the use of a slab machine to press clay into a sheet that the ceramicist then cuts into different shapes and patterns. It’s a method that holds significant echoes of Lee’s background in fashion, creating patterns for clothes and cutting out fabrics. The way she presents her work and creates collections, is also informed by her fashion background.
“I apply a lot of what I learned,” says Lee. “It’s very much in me. Everything you do along the way, even if it doesn’t seem valid, it’s the only way you would’ve gotten to where you are.”
In 2017, Lee moved with her husband and three children from Greenpoint, Brooklyn to a historic farmhouse in the Lower Hudson Valley’s Pound Ridge. There, a converted barn serves as her ceramics studio. Living in close proximity to nature, she says, has created more space for her both internally and externally, changing the way she approaches her work.
The region has offered exciting resources, too — like the ability to work with the natural elements found on her property and its environs. She harvests mud from riverbanks, processing it and turning it into clay, and incorporates ash from her studio’s wood-burning fireplace into many of her glazes.
The use of these natural elements seems particularly apt when considering Lee’s oeuvre. The influence of nature — its softness, unpredictability and the contemplative wonder it inspires — can be viscerally felt in the sinuous, organic, intuitive shapes of her sculptures. She also points to the architecture of her native São Paolo — Oscar Niemeyer’s free-flowing curves and Lina Bo Bardi’s playful modernism — as being instrumental in the development of her style.
Lee has long dreamed of sharing the benefits of working with clay with others. And in 2021, she founded Unwind Retreat, a Pound Ridge-based workshop that offers (in addition to restorative yoga and nourishing meals prepared by a holistic chef) basic guidance around creating with clay. She stipulates that the experience of Unwind is not one of formal instruction. “You’re not coming to learn ceramics; you’re using clay to unwind and relax.” Participants can expect to focus more on the meditative process of creation than the eventual outcome.
Late capitalist society might balk at the notion of valuing process over end result, but when it comes to creating, Lee swears by this approach.
“It’s taken me over a decade to finally appreciate it,” she admits.
Over the years, she’s also learned another invaluable lesson: to love the mistakes and interruptions endemic to any artistic practice; to view these as opportunities rather than frustrations. “I love when I start making something and it becomes something completely different,” she says. “It could be the result of accidentally dropping a piece of clay and changing its shape, or maybe I wasn’t able to finish something in one day and have to go back to it the next day and it changes. It’s a collaboration with everything: your mood, the clay, the situation, interruptions. The unexpected is exciting to me.”
Find @re.jin.lee in Pound Ridge, New York. www.rejinlee.com
By Annabel Graham
Images courtesy of Re Jin Lee
