Lauren Kolyn Photography.
Lana is a sculpture artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. She grew up on the historic shores of Georgian Bay. A passion for story-telling and a firm relationship with its Natural History and folklore have found their way into the symbolic narratives that she creates. Lana received an honours degree from Queen’s University and a diploma in Ceramics, Craft and Design from Sheridan College. She has exhibited her work internationally, most recently as a Canadian contributor at the Salon Nationale des Beaux Arts, (Louvre, Paris), about Canadian species at risk. She is a 2017 medalist of the Société Académique Arts-Sciences-Lettres.
She strives to access an archetypal language that allows magic to exist in our everyday lives. This language harkens back to places that are familiar yet subversive of her material. She approaches themes of transience in shared human-experience; ephemeral states solidified in delicate porcelain. Her material, once malleable or liquid minerals, is symbolically transformed by the elements, then crystallized in time.
Lana is a proud solo canoeist and a lifelong naturalist. Being dazzled by nature and the supernatural has been a constant motivation to be their advocate. Recent adventures and tests of will in the Canadian wilderness, highlight the junction of wonder, that is the indifference of the elements to survival, crossed by the persistence and perpetuity of life. Her work, is forever exploring a fascination with the kinship between life and death; their consanguinity relating directly to the beauty of experience.
Her current work and research explores the concept of the Quinta Essentia (or Pemptoussia); the Fifth Element thought to be the alchemical philosopher’s stone. She is intrigued by the corresponding concept of its “threefold” nature of gold (material, spiritual and etherial gold) hidden within alchemical teachings about transmutation in nature and how it relates to the Human psyche and experience.
Clay, can be forever unchanged on the scale of human artifact, yet symbolizes an inherent paradoxical fragility. Simultaneously one of the oldest traces of ourselves but insignificant on a geological scale. One time a vestige of experience later to be re-upped into the landscape of metamorphic rock. A snapshot pertaining to fractals of some cosmic dust.
