YehRim Lee's Ceramics Practice Blooms in the Desert

At the same time, she wrestled with a question familiar to many artists raised within strong traditions: Was she supposed to continue making Korean ceramics, or could she pursue the experimental forms that had begun to occupy her mind?

It took some time, but Lee eventually stopped seeing those choices as mutually exclusive. “Even if you’re not making traditional work, it doesn’t mean you’re not Korean,” she says. Her father agrees. He cares less about what she makes than whether she makes it her own. 

The way she builds, though, still comes from him. Many of Lee’s sculptures are made using the onggi technique, wherein thick ropes of clay (tarayeom) are stretched by throwing them against the floor. Rather than a loud bang, the impact is more like a gentle swoosh. Each rope is then added layer by layer, with its lower edge smeared and compressed into the wall beneath it to strengthen the structure.

This method allows Lee to build big quickly, resulting in monumental sculptures that seem to defy gravity. Throughout her studio, puffy scalloped edges bulge outward, architectural buttresses fold over themselves, and sunset-colored glazes melt into swirls of greens and creams. Some surfaces resemble clouds, while others feel washed by years of desert wind. Though grounded in Korean ceramic traditions, the sculptures possess a sense of openness and experimentation often associated with the West Coast. “It’s very California,” she says. 

After a series of long-term residencies, Lee and her husband, poet Frank Montesonti, settled down in the high desert and had two children. There, they built a life around her ceramics practice, making room for a studio, a solar-powered kiln, and a shipping container large enough to store her growing body of work. She jokes that the container determined where they ended up. “We needed land,” she says.

The property has become an extension of her studio. Chairs gather in circles on the sand. Sculptures hang from the exterior of sheds. Layers of pink and green glaze—generated over multiple firings—echo the colors of creosote and evening sky. “My work shifted with my lifestyle,” she says. “Coming here and redoing the house, I’m thinking about furniture and interiors.”

Her growing interest in the relationship between sculpture and domestic life eventually opened the door to a lucrative partnership with influential interior designer Kelly Wearstler. A handful of side tables for Wearstler’s Terra collection currently sit in Lee’s studio, ready to be glazed and fired, while more are being prepared for bisque.

Jacqueline Huynh Young is a Vietnamese American artist and writer based in Los Angeles.