Lisa Reardon
Lisa Reardon (she/her. b. 1980, Cape Town, South Africa) began her career as a fashion buyer. She immigrated from South Africa with her husband and 2 kids in 2016. She now sustains a regular practice of experimenting with clay and mixed media from her home studio in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Lisa is self-taught and makes intuitively. She hand builds clay and experiments with glaze and sand and slip. She often takes a hammer to fired pieces to break them and then reassemble the pieces into her sculptures. She has always had a love of form that feels organic and wild and makes you rethink femininity. She tries to embrace overgrown wildness of shape and texture as can be found in the natural world. Her pieces tend to feel organic, feminine, and of the Earth.
I was lucky to first meet Mandi at Pottery Northwest studio in Seattle, where she was teaching a class. I was feeling isolated in my studio and was looking for some encouragement and direction. Mandi’s one-on-one mentorship helped me to build an artist’s statement and taught me how to correctly present my work in photographs. Her studio visits gave me feedback and insight into my practice, and I am so grateful to have had that time with her. Mandi is calm and contemplative and an all-round rad human. She helped me to grow as an artist and I highly recommend her mentorship.