pottery
Glynnis Lessing began a lifelong love of ceramics at 9 when she learned to throw from a Japanese potter at Carleton College. She made pots in high school, worked for a potter and went on to study art at Macalester and the University of Minnesota where she earned a BFA.
Directly after college, a move to Chicago led Lessing to Lill Street studios and several other institutions, where she began working & teaching pottery - marrying and raising a family along the way.
In 2008, Lessing started participating in shows and art fairs on a full-time basis; eventually moving back to Minnesota in 2012 where she began teaching at the Northern Clay Center. She continued to work full time as a potter selling her work at fairs, studio tours, online and in retail stores and galleries.
Her studio is in her grandfather's old milking parlor on the ancestral farm where she lives with her family; surrounded by bees and crops, the trees her grandfather planted, and the fertile earth.
Lessing strives to make beautiful, yet highly functional pots that will find an intimate niche in the daily lives of the people who take them home.
Her work is created with the hope that it will be aesthetically pleasing to people who choose it for their use instead of the mass-produced things that are commonly available; that something that is designed to be balanced for use, scaled to the hand, and created by another person will be more satisfying to use and more pleasing to look at.
She enjoys the constraint of functionality which challenges and inspires her. Lessing endeavors to make forms that are balanced and beautiful but are not constructed exclusively to show off the surface. They are shaped for inherent harmony and pleasing lines; the form inspires the surface and the surface enhances the form.
The surface decoration is a reflection of her love of the natural world and the belief in the restorative power of being outside. It is Lessing’s desire to share the pleasure she takes in noticing her environment: patterns of leaves, how a bird perches on a reed, the silhouettes of trees just after sundown.
Her work can call people’s attention to these things with the hope that people will value them as she does and that these qualities can nourish them just as much as does the food that is served or made in her pots.
10x10" clay tray with hand painting and sgraffito technique.