Raina Lee cooks up custom glazes inspired by 8-bit colors and vibrant things that nearly make your eyes bleed. Raina Lee, a ceramicist who lives and works in Los Angeles, prefers the strange over the perfect, the grotesque over the conventionally refined. Her work looks a little bit like it dropped from the sky in a meteor shower and maybe melted a little during entry.
?There are a lot of really beautiful ceramics out there ? a lot of minimal, gorgeous, well-done ceramics,? she says. ?I hope that each one of my pieces can give this sort of feeling of, like, Where did this strange thing come from"?
For the past few years, she has been exploring different techniques from her home studio in the Mount Washington area of Los Angeles, where she resides with her partner, Mark Watanabe, an architect. It?s become an obsession of hers to create weird surfaces, and she does this by cooking up custom glazes.
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A post shared by Raina Lee (@rainajlee) on Jul 20, 2020 at 8:51am PDT

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And strange they are: Lee?s ceramics are mottled, bumpy, and oozing. They are sometimes iridescent, sometimes neon, and sometimes pastel, but always manage to be vibrant. They seem like they are creatures from a glowing alien world, which makes sense considering Lee?s background. She?s a writer and ed...